Join us for Skyscrapers’ November Monthly Meeting at Seagrave Memorial Observatory Featuring Rafael Martínez-Galarza
Saturday, November 7, 2026
Social hour at 6:30pm, Presentation at 7:00pm
AI for Astronomy: Exotic Black Holes, Galaxy Evolution, and the Role of the Humans
In this talk Rafael will share the experience of how at AstroAI we are using modern methods of artificial intelligence for advancing profound questions in astrophysics, from the discovery of exotic compact objects in the Universe, such as neutron stars and stellar mass black holes and their imprints in the X-ray Universe, to the characterization of galaxies that are potential hosts to gravitational wave events. He will show how machine learning has opened new avenues of research, showcase interesting discoveries in the high energy universe, the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, and the morphology of the most anomalous galaxies. He will also discuss the opportunities challenges that agentic AI has created for astronomers and scientists in general, and his view of how to successfully safeguard the human experience of discovery.
Rafael Martínez-Galarza is the deputy director of AstroAI at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, where he leads a research group on multimodal representation learning, and applications in astrophysics. This includes generative models for modeling astronomical data distributions, Large Language Models in astro, contrastive learning, and simulation-based inference for high energy astrophysics. In the past, he has worked as a scientist for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, where he was involved in the curation and scientific exploitation of large X-ray data repositories. As a former member of NASA’s JWST Mid-Infrared Instrument Consortium, he is also interested in infrared astronomy, in particular in observational investigations of starburst regions/galaxies. Outside of work, he enjoys sailing, biking, traveling, and reading about history. He also writes about science in his personal blog.
