LAM Seminar: Pierre-Alain Duc “Detecting low surface brightness structures on astronomical optical images: science impact and challenges”

The exploration of the Low Surface Brightness (LSB) Universe currently motivates several surveys across the world, carried out with a number of instruments, and provides observational constrains for numerical simulations. It impacts multiple scientific fields, including the structure of the interstellar matter, galaxy archeology, galaxy evolution and cosmology, and has generated passionate debates, for instance regarding the very existence, nature and properties of the so called Ultra-Diffuse-Galaxies. Meanwhile the community prepares for the exploitation of next generation surveys, including Euclid and LSST. Detecting, identifying and characterising the faint, diffuse and extended optical light of the LSB structures on very wide areas on the sky raises a number of technical difficulties and challenges, that will be presented during the seminar. The first attempts to use artificial intelligence, and in particular deep learning techniques, to deal with these issues will be addressed.