AI and the World's Hard Problems · Astronomy & space · arXiv · 2026-10-20
Unveiling Hidden Lyman Alpha Emitters in the DESI DR1 Data
Many Lyman alpha emitters in the DESI Data Release 1 spectra have incorrect redshift estimates because the current pipeline is not designed for galaxies at z>2. The authors trained a CNN on visually inspected spectra to detect these emitters and measure their redshifts. The model achieved 95.2% purity and 95.9% completeness, and on about 2 million emission-line galaxy spectra it found 19,685 emitters at z≈2–3.5 within 12 minutes on a single GPU.