The universe is unfathomably vast, and for the astronomers trying to understand it, that means having to gather a commensurately mind-boggling amount of data. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was something that could help speed through looking for patterns in all the trillions of galaxies out there, and their quadrillions of stars? The term “AI” has become a catch-all these days for all kinds of dubious tech of varying degrees of automation and reliability, but certain types have found a very practical and welcome use among astronomers. Using a custom-built AI tool, for instance, a team of scientists at the European Space Agency have identified over a thousand “anomalies” in an archive of Hubble space telescope images that have gone unnoticed for decades, according to a NASA release. Their work, described in a new study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is the first systematic search for astrophysical anomalies across the entire archive. “Archival observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now span 35 years, offering a rich dataset in which astrophysical anomalies may …