An international collaboration of astrophysicists that includes researchers from Yale has created and tested a detection system that uses gravitational waves to map out the locations of merging black holes — known as supermassive black hole binaries — around the universe.

Such a map would provide a vital new way to explore and understand astronomy and physics, just as X-rays and radio waves did in earlier eras, the researchers say. The new protocol demonstrated by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) offers a detection protocol to populate the map.

SAN ANTONIO — April 14, 2026 — New research led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) integrated three types of machine learning models to generate solar magnetic patches with physical properties and used those as a query to find matching patches in real observations. This elevates generative artificial intelligence (AI) from a means to produce artificial data to a novel tool for scientific data interrogation, supporting applicability beyond the heliophysics domain.