Hundreds of new ‘anomalies’ in Hubble data defy explanation
AI helped researchers probe the Hubble Space Telescope’s archive to find strange celestial objects, including some indescribable by science.
An artificial intelligence (AI) tool has uncovered more than 1,000 strange cosmic objects in the Hubble Space Telescope’s image archive, including some that cannot be explained by science.
After searching with the tool for just two days, researchers found 1,300 oddball objects, including chaotic merging galaxies, stars trailing gas, and even some objects that haven’t been classified yet. Of these, 800 had never been spotted before, European Space Agency (ESA) officials said in a Jan. 27 statement. The findings were published Dec. 16, 2025, in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“Additional discoveries included galaxies with massive star-forming clumps, jellyfish-looking galaxies with gaseous ‘tentacles,’ and edge-on planet-forming disks in our own galaxy resembling hamburgers,” NASA officials said in a separate statement. “Remarkably, several dozen objects defied existing classification schemes entirely.”
