Artificial Intelligence Reveals New Secrets of the Milky Way
The team behind the M. N. Pavlinsky ART-XC telescope aboard Russia’s Spektr-RG observatory is continuing to expand the known population of symbiotic X-ray systems in our Galaxy. Artificial intelligence helped them identify one such system from hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources. Observations with ART-XC and other telescopes confirmed its nature.
Artificial intelligence is now moving to the forefront of astrophysics. In October 2026, Russian astronomers from the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI RAS), working with colleagues in South Africa, made a breakthrough: using machine learning, they discovered a new symbiotic X-ray binary system, J1633. The finding illustrates how information technology is transforming fundamental science.
A Needle in a Cosmic Haystack
How do you find something hidden from view? The researchers turned to the archives of the XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory and began examining hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources. At that scale, manually analyzing every source is practically impossible. Machine-learning algorithms came to the rescue, trained on known binary systems. AI acted as a highly attentive filter, excluding objects that had already been studied and identifying 23 promising candidates. J1633 was among them.
The Dance of a Neutron Star and a Giant
What is J1633? It is a close cosmic dance between a compact neutron star and a red giant with a temperature of about 4,200 kelvin. The giant sheds matter that the neutron star eagerly accretes, producing intense X-ray emission.
The discovery required independent confirmation from multiple instruments. XMM-Newton detected pulsations with a period of 25.9 minutes, and Russia’s ART-XC telescope aboard Spektr-RG confirmed their nature. Optical observations with the Southern African Large Telescope provided the final piece of evidence by determining the spectral class of the donor star. Scientists estimate that the Milky Way may contain around 200 such systems, yet only a handful are currently known.
Practical Benefits: From Everyday Life to Science
What does this discovery mean for ordinary people? Its value lies in the development of critical skills and capabilities. Here, AI is not being used by banks or retailers to automate business operations; it is tackling some of science’s most demanding big-data challenges.
For Russia, the discovery demonstrates the value of its scientific infrastructure: data from Spektr-RG are leading to new findings. For the international research community, it expands the catalog of rare systems and helps scientists investigate the evolution of binary stars. It is too early to talk about commercial exports of this IT solution: it is a scientific method, not an off-the-shelf software product. But methods like this help build world-class centers of expertise capable of applying AI to some of the most challenging research projects.
A Global Trend: The Age of AI in Astronomy
The discovery of J1633 is part of a broader global shift. Consider just a few developments from recent years: in 2022, the AI tool Zoobot identified 40,000 ring galaxies; in 2023, BTSbot autonomously detected a supernova; and in 2025, Russian scientists from Ural Federal University (UrFU) contributed to the development of ExoMiner++, a neural network for NASA. In early 2026, the Anomaly Match algorithm retrieved more than 800 previously unknown objects from the Hubble archives.
Astronomy is moving from an era of chance discoveries to one of systematic AI-assisted searches. An algorithm does not replace an astronomer. Instead, it points the way, helping researchers direct telescopes toward the most promising targets for follow-up observations.
The ART-XC team and IKI RAS still have much work ahead. The nature of another enigmatic system, Swift J2037, discovered back in 2006, was recently confirmed. Researchers expect that applying AI to new Spektr-RG data will make it possible to conduct a comprehensive census of symbiotic systems in the Galaxy. Artificial intelligence is becoming humanity’s guide through the vast ocean of the Universe.
