AI and the World's Hard Problems · Astronomy & space · arXiv · 2026-10-20
Newly Identified Planetary Nebula Candidates in M31 using Deep-Learning Search of Hubble Space Telescope Images
Only about a thousand planetary nebulae are known in the disc of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), even though Hubble has imaged a quarter of a billion stars there. The authors trained four Faster R-CNN detectors with partial supervision on Hubble mosaics and combined their rankings into one candidate list. On test fields, 73% of the known nebulae ranked in the top 200, and 175 of the top 400 candidates appear in no published catalog.