Auckland Astronomical Society

Dr Heloise Stevance - How can AI help us find exploding stars and Hungry Black Holes? - March 2025

Dr Heloise Stevance Modern sky surveys can image the entire sky every night. In doing so, they discover new cosmic explosions - from stars collapsing to stars being devoured by black holes. But the sky is vast and the alerts are many - far too many for humans to keep up with. When the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) begins in 2026, millions of nightly discoveries will flood astronomers. Partnering with experts in sky surveys and applied machine learning, I am developing a Virtual Research Assistant that harnesses A.I. to help experts find the cosmic explosions that made the space dust we come from. Dr Stevance is a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow at the University of Oxford working with international sky surveys (ATLAS, Vera Rubin) to find extragalactic transients (supernovae, tidal disruption events). She works at the interface between Astronomy and AI, developing "Virtual Research Assistants" to help astronomers find the needles in the cosmic hay stacks. She is an award winning science communicator and early career astrophysicist (Beatrice Tinsley Lecture Prize 2021, Caroline Hearschel Prize 2024), and her talk will be an updated version of her Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture.