By NASA Hubble Mission Team
Publication Date: 2026-01-27 15:00:00
A team of astronomers has used a cutting-edge artificial intelligence-based technique to uncover rare astronomical phenomena in archived data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The team analyzed nearly 100 million image patches from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a page. In just two and a half days, they identified more than 1,300 strange-looking objects – more than 800 of which had never been documented in the scientific literature.
Most of the anomalies were galaxies undergoing mergers or interactions and exhibited unusual morphologies or trailing, elongated streams of stars and gas. Others were gravitational lensing, in which the gravity of a foreground galaxy distorts spacetime and bends the light of a background galaxy into arcs or rings. Other discoveries included galaxies with massive star-forming clumps, jellyfish-like galaxies with gaseous “tentacles,” and edge-on planet-forming galaxies…