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IMAGE: Cassiopeia A, or Cas A, is a supernova remnant located 10,000 light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, and is the remnant of a once massive star that died in...
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Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO
Cambridge, MA (December 17, 2020)--Artificial intelligence is classifying real supernova explosions without the traditional use of spectra, thanks to a team of astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. The complete data sets and resulting classifications are publicly available for open use.
By training a machine learning model to categorize supernovae based on their visible characteristics, the astronomers were able to classify real data from the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey for 2,315 supernovae with an accuracy rate of 82-percent without the use of spectra.