Thursday, August 8, 2019

AI Is Helping Astronomers Scour the Skies for Habitable Planets

Imagine staring into the high-beams of an oncoming car. Now imagine trying to pick out a speck of dust in the glare of the headlights. That’s the challenge Olivier Guyon and Damien Gratadour face as they try to find the dull glint of an exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system — beside the bright light of its star.

The pair — Guyon is an instrument developer for Japan’s Subaru Telescope and an astronomer at the University of Arizona, and Gratadour is an associate professor at the Observatoire de Paris and an instrument scientist at the Australian National University — spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how they’re using GPU-powered extreme adaptive optics in very large telescopes to image nearby habitable planets.