Claude filled in the third of the sky missing from the ultraviolet map, finishing weeks of work in days

On October 8 Anthropic published the first complete map of the sky in ultraviolet light. Brice Ménard, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and a researcher at Anthropic, made it with Claude Science. UV light is absorbed by the ozone layer, so it can only be observed from space, and telescopes avoided the bright galactic plane to protect their detectors, leaving about a third of the sky unobserved.

Claude ran a team of agents to gather and cross-calibrate public data, including 38,000 observations from NASA's GALEX and South Korea's FIMS/SPEAR. It filled the gaps by learning how UV brightness relates to visible, infrared and radio data; tested on deliberately hidden regions, its estimates came within about 10% of real measurements. Ménard said the work normally takes weeks, which is why it kept getting put off, and that he finished it over several days of back-and-forth with Claude.