AI's Cosmic Eye: Spotting Exploding Stars with a Handful of Hints
Imagine sifting through millions of nightly sky snapshots, hunting for the universe's fireworks—supernovas, black hole feasts, rogue asteroids—while dodging pesky fakes like satellite streaks or cosmic zap rays. It's a nightmare for astronomers drowning in data. But on October 8, 2025, a game-changing AI breakthrough from the University of Oxford and Google Cloud turned this chaos into cosmic clarity. Enter Gemini, Google's powerhouse large language model (LLM), reimagined as an astronomy whiz. No need for massive training datasets or black-box algorithms. With just 15 labeled examples per telescope survey—think a quick photo album of real vs. bogus sky changes—Gemini learns...