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AI Unlocks Hundreds of Cosmic Anomalies in Hubble Archive

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January 27, 2026 10:00AM (EST)Release ID: 2026-005
Two distorted galaxies on the black background of space. At left, an edge-on spiral galaxy appearing like a white thin bar extending from 8 o’clock to 2 o’clock. At right, a face-on spiral with faint, broad arcs of material to its left and right.

Summary

New findings include galaxy mergers and "jellyfish" galaxies.

Neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), can learn to recognize patterns in data, which makes them useful for tasks like image recognition. They can analyze vast amounts of imaging data in a fraction of the time that a human would take. Thanks to its longevity, the Hubble Space Telescope has accumulated a 35-year archive ripe for harvesting.

A team of astronomers developed an AI tool named AnomalyMatch to comb Hubble’s archives for rare and unusual objects. The results: more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance, hundreds of which had never been seen before.

Full Article

A team of astronomers has employed a cutting-edge, artificial intelligence-assisted technique to uncover rare astronomical phenomena within archived data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance in just two and a half days — more than 800 of which had never been documented in scientific literature. Most of the anomalies were galaxies undergoing mergers or interactions, which ...

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News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-26555. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

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