Astrophysicist uses Claude Science to make a complete ultraviolet sky map

Brice Ménard, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and an Anthropic researcher, used Claude Science to build a complete ultraviolet map of the sky. NASA’s GALEX imaged about two-thirds of the sky in roughly 38,000 observations between 2003 and 2013 and skipped bright regions including much of the Milky Way plane. Claude coordinated agents to download surveys from NASA, ESA, South Korea’s FIMS/SPEAR and Europe’s TD-1, remove star glare, cross-calibrate instruments and merge them on a common grid, then filled the gaps with inpainting trained on how UV brightness relates to visible, infrared and radio data, adding estimates for more than 100 million Gaia stars. About a third of the map is predicted; on test regions with hidden data the model came within about 10% of real measurements, and every predicted pixel is labelled with an uncertainty.

When

8 Oct 2026

ID

WTA-N-2026-0275

Where

United States

Who

Anthropic, Johns Hopkins University, NASA, European Space Agency; Brice Ménard

Topics

Research, AI agents

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