VASCO: The old stars are dying and formation of new stars is decreasing, which could lead to end of the galaxy, finds a new study done with the help of Artificial Intelligence-based algorithm, developed jointly by BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Allahabad University and the Paris Observatory, France.
“This AI-based algorithm was used to hunt for more merging galaxies in the open sky. It has led to the discovery of thousands of double-nuclei galaxies, out of which 159 were confirmed to have pairs of growing supermassive black holes or active galactic nuclei (AGN) as they are usually called,” Professor, Computer Science and Information Systems and Co-ordinator-APPCAIR, BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, Snehanshu Saha told O Heraldo.
Using this technology, the investigators also found that the merging galaxies have a tendency to look red — indicating the presence of old stars and the decreased formation of new stars.
“Since star formation is the lifeblood of galaxies, red galaxies represent the old, evolved population of galaxies, the decreased formation of new stars to replace the dead ones means that eventually our galaxy system could also collapse,” Prof Saha said.
This study has been published in the prestigious Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Speaking about the advantages of this technology, Prof Saha said that space related research will now be possible faster with greater accuracy.
“People in cosmology are always looking for answers to questions like when will the next Big Bang happen, is there a possibility that the universe could collapse etc. Lot of these answers are found by analysing millions of images obtained from the data that is constantly generated by the space missions that are undertaken across the world. But then the trouble was that there are a lot of images to analyse and manpower is limited,” he said.
“We had to rely on manual inspection of these images to figure out whether there is a possibility of certain star systems to collapse or die. Our algorithm can scan and analyse 10 million images in less than a day, including the new ones that keep coming in through satellites. Earlier it used to take months and even years to analyse this humongous data,” said Prof Saha, who is an authority on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
This technology can also be used in the healthcare sector, where radiologists will be able to detect cancerous tumours more accurately and quickly, the BITS Pilani senior faculty said.