Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2026

MAY-JUNE 2026 scope. Increasingly, astronomers must ask how they can find a cosmic needle in a haystack the size of the Universe. Recently, researchers David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez of the European Space Agency developed an AI tool that allows them to inspect millions of astronomical images in a fraction of the time it would take a human. The team trained their tool and demonstrated its capabilities using the Hubble Legacy Archive, which contains tens of thousands of da- tasets spanning Hubble’s long life- time. “Archival observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now stretch back 35 years, providing a treasure trove of data in which as- trophysical anomalies might be found,” says David O’Ryan, lead au- thor of the research paper pub- lished in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics . Astrophysical anomalies are usually discovered when scientists manually R are and anomalous objects like colliding galaxies, gravita- tional lenses and ring galaxies are of immense scientific interest, but they’re difficult to find in the growing masses of data from tele- scopes like the Hubble Space Tele- AI-assisted method discover hundreds of cosmic anomalies by NASA/ESA Bethany Downer