Scientists in Ohio State's astronomy department are using artificial intelligence to find star clusters unable to be seen by the human eye and even a few that have never been seen before.
Everett MacArthur is a graduate student studying astronomy at Ohio State and spoke with WOSU's Stu Osborne about the study.
Stu Osborne: For those of us who don't know, myself included, what is a quasar?
Everett McArthur: Quasars are these highly luminous black holes. So, what a quasar is, is the beginning stages of a galaxy. When you probe deep into the universe, you are looking backward in time. And so these quasars are when the galaxy has a lot of gas and dust falling into a black hole and that black hole becomes incredibly unstable and becomes incredibly bright as well. These things are like flashlights. In the distant universe. They're so bright that they outshine everything in the vicinity. So, Quasar is just a very luminous black hole.
Stu Osborne: So, on an entry level, how did you use AI to define these?
Everett McArthur: The key thing here is not that we found quasars, it's that we've found quasar as gravitational lenses for background galaxies. So, what this means is if you have a glass cup in your cabinet or in your office or whatever, and you hold that glass cup to a distance, then what you'll see is that distant objects are warped and distorted by that glass cup. And if you just replace that glass cups for the quasar, and the distant object being a galaxy, then that is what you're looking at.
The reason why this is really important is because quasars as strong gravitational lenses is very rare. People at Ohio State do gravitational lensing. They find galaxies, they find even microlens planets, but quasars, as strong, gravitational lenses is a very rare phenomenon that allows for key understandings in how our galaxy is formed.
Stu Osborne: How important do you think this discovery is to your field and future space exploration?
Everett McArthur: This is a great question. One of the key things that people ask is how does a black hole and the galaxy that's inside that black hole relate to each other? And so by probing these quasars as strong gravitational lenses, you're actually looking at how to precisely probe that relationship. You're literally just looking at it, measuring something, and then from there you can understand how that relationship is formed.
Our field right now, astronomy as a field, is moving into an era of big data and these massive telescopes have massive amounts of data, huge amounts of data, that will then pose a challenge for astronomers. So, how do you through this AI, artificial intelligence, all of this is really a true demonstration of how we can parse through the data, find rare phenomena, and even this one scientific discovery will allow for AI, artificial intelligence, and many other things, machine learning methods to then probe deeply into the universe.
Stu Osborne: I imagine as a graduate student it's exciting to be a part of this groundbreaking discovery and things like that. What are your plans after you graduate from Ohio State?
Everett McArthur: Academia. So the ultimate goal is to be a professor and to continue doing research, to continue understanding our universe and seeing how I as a scientist and how many other scientists can collectively understand these strange phenomena.
