When the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope began returning data in 2022, UC Santa Cruz professor Brant Robertson and his colleagues did what astronomers have always done: They stared at the sky and tried to understand what they were seeing. This time, the sky arrived as terabytes.
A new video from NVIDIA explains how astronomers are using powerful computational tools to make sense of the early universe. The James Webb Space Telescope has provided unprecedented views of galaxies forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But analyzing the immense flood of data requires sophisticated algorithms and GPU acceleration.
Robertson and his team are using NVIDIA GPUs to process the telescope's high-resolution images, identifying distant galaxies and measuring their properties. The video highlights how the combination of cutting-edge hardware and software is allowing scientists to peer deeper into cosmic history than ever before.