Claude Science Builds the First Complete Ultraviolet Sky Map

Astrophysicist Brice Ménard at Johns Hopkins University has built the first complete map of the sky in ultraviolet light. He used Claude Science, a research workspace built by Anthropic, the company behind the Claude models. AI agents downloaded the data on their own from several space missions, including NASA's GALEX satellite. GALEX covered only about two-thirds of the sky. The agents calibrated the data and merged it. They filled the remaining gaps using inpainting, a technique that reconstructs missing areas from neighboring data. In tests, the predicted values differed from real measurements by about 10 percent on average.

The agents ran the whole pipeline themselves: downloading, calibration, merging, gap-filling. No human checked each step along the way. A 10 percent deviation from real measurements is an honest number, not a zero-error result. It shows agents can speed up routine data work. But the accuracy still needs to be checked against real instruments.