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LiveScience
LiveScience
Elizabeth Howell

Hundreds of new 'anomalies' in Hubble data defy explanation

A collage of six images, showing different kinds of “anomalous” astrophysical objects. These are galaxies with unusual shapes, among them a ring-shaped galaxy, a bipolar galaxy, a group of merging galaxies, and three galaxies with warped arcs created by gravitational lensing.

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.

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