Forget Storming Area 51, AI’s Helping Astronomers Scour the Skies for Habitable Planets - Ep. 93

Imagine staring into the high-beams of an oncoming car. Now imagine trying to pick out a speck of dust in the glare of the headlights. That’s the challenge Olivier Guyon and Damien Gratadour face as they try to find the dull glint of an exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system — beside the bright light of its star.

The pair -- Guyon is an instrument developer for Japan’s Subaru Telescope, and an astronomer at the University of Arizona; and Gratadour is an associate professor at the Observatoire de Paris and an instrument scientist at the Australian National University -- spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how they’re using GPU-powered extreme adaptive optics in very large telescopes to image nearby habitable planets.