Overview
- AnomalyMatch, developed by ESA researchers David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez, scanned nearly 100 million Hubble image cutouts in about two and a half days.
- More than 800 of the flagged objects have not been previously described in the scientific literature, and several dozen remain unexplained.
- Most candidates are unusual galaxies and gravitational lenses, with additional rare morphologies such as jellyfish galaxies, giant gas clumps, and edge-on planet-forming disks.
- The highest-probability detections were manually inspected by the authors, and the findings were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics with example images released by ESA.
- The approach is presented as a scalable path for forthcoming data-heavy surveys, including ESA’s Euclid, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s LSST, and NASA’s Roman Space Telescope.