10-10-2023, 08:46 AM
Does the local solar system extend farther than we thought?
I'm a bit too tired to make comments or summarize this myself right now, but using AI astronomers seem to be detecting something new beyond the known Kuiper Belt of cold icy objects like Pluto using data from Subaru on Mauna Kea. This article sums it up:
"A new method for scanning telescope images for the faintest signs of rock far beyond Pluto has uncovered evidence that our Solar System's disc of material extends far further into interstellar space than we thought."
[...]
"To take at least some of the drudgery out of the process and speed things up, the research team made use of machine learning, training a neural network on made-up objects inserted into telescope imagery before setting it loose on data collected using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 2020 and 2021.
Compared with a human search through the 2020 data, the machine learning technique identified twice as many Kuiper Belt Objects, suggesting a distinct rise in the density of material at a distance of around 60 to 80 AU along New Horizons' trajectory."
https://www.sciencealert.com/distant-obj...an-we-knew
I'm a bit too tired to make comments or summarize this myself right now, but using AI astronomers seem to be detecting something new beyond the known Kuiper Belt of cold icy objects like Pluto using data from Subaru on Mauna Kea. This article sums it up:
"A new method for scanning telescope images for the faintest signs of rock far beyond Pluto has uncovered evidence that our Solar System's disc of material extends far further into interstellar space than we thought."
[...]
"To take at least some of the drudgery out of the process and speed things up, the research team made use of machine learning, training a neural network on made-up objects inserted into telescope imagery before setting it loose on data collected using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 2020 and 2021.
Compared with a human search through the 2020 data, the machine learning technique identified twice as many Kuiper Belt Objects, suggesting a distinct rise in the density of material at a distance of around 60 to 80 AU along New Horizons' trajectory."
https://www.sciencealert.com/distant-obj...an-we-knew