Studying the stars with machine learning

To keep up with an impending astronomical increase in data about our universe, astrophysicists turn to machine learning. Kevin Schawinski had a problem. In 2007 he was an astrophysicist at Oxford University and hard at work reviewing seven years' worth of photographs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey--images of more than 900,000 galaxies. He spent his days looking at image after image, noting whether a galaxy looked spiral or elliptical, or logging which way it seemed to be spinning. Technologic...