Intelligent Agents are helping astronomers find out more about the Universe. The software has been developed to monitor the vast amount of information generated by telescopes and help the scientists track rapid and violent events, like massive supernova explosions.
The problem facing astronomers is the unpredictability of the Universe. Often many astronomical events happen suddenly and without warning. It could mean that astronomers miss things like a subtle change in the brightness of stars which may indicate planets in orbit around them. To deal with this issue, the Intelligent Agents were created by the eScience Telescopes for Astronomical Research project, a joint venture by the University of Exeter and the Liverpool John Moores University. The Intelligent Agents take advantage of Grid technologies, which allow individual computers to be used as one massive processing resource. In the future, the software could even be sending messages or images to a mobile phone, alerting an astronomer to new and interesting events in the skies.
