The lab notebook is becoming a hypothesis engine
the lab notebook is becoming a hypothesis engine: google deepmind’s co-scientist, published in nature in may, generates and debates research hypotheses with researchers, and an ai sweep of the hubble archive flagged 1,300 unusual objects in two and a half days from 100 million cutouts. the microscope let us see.
this lets us ask what to look for.
Context
NASA Science reported on Jan 27, 2026 that astronomers used an AI-assisted method, AnomalyMatch, on nearly 100 million cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive. The team identified more than 1,300 anomalous objects in two and a half days, over 800 never documented before, and confirmed them manually.
Nature Astronomy covered the work on Feb 20, 2026.
The 1,300 objects, the roughly 100 million cutouts and the two and a half days match the sources. The sources call them anomalous objects, with the classification run taking 2.5 days. The Google co-scientist Nature publication in May was not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the co-scientist paper to check the publication date.
Sources
- NASA Science, Jan 27, 2026science.nasa.gov
- Nature Astronomy, Feb 20, 2026nature.com
- A&A, Dec 2025aanda.org
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 2 October 2026 at 22:03 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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