NEMESIS has the ambition to reshape our understanding on the formation of stars by employing artificial intelligence methods to interpret the largest, panchromatic data collection of young stellar objects. Recent evidence suggests that planets form synchronously rather than sequentially to their host stars, indicating a rapid early evolution of star-planet systems. To ascertain these timescales, it is necessary to first determine the characteristic transitions that describe each phase of star formation. The definition of classes for young stellar objects was made possible more than 30 years ago, due to the first space-based infrared sky surveys. Whilst successful in determining global properties, current classification is prone to large uncertainties, and therefore, timescales, which are based on population statistics among different classes in a steady-state evolution, remain dubious.
Today, we have in hand significantly higher quality and much larger volumes of data, more advanced computing methods and higher computing power, which allow us to revisit the standard star-formation paradigm and in particular the evolutionary scheme of young stars, using new machine learning techniques applicable to big data.
NEMESIS aims to readjust the current classification scheme and its characteristic timescales so that it is concurrent with the most recent observational and theoretical constraints. To meet these goals NEMESIS will compile the largest, panchromatic dataset comprising of all young stellar objects in nearby star-forming regions, harnessing critical information that resides in data from space missions. It will reprocess and analyze this unique dataset with supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms, deep learning neural networks for object detection, clustering and regression analysis of images in order to advance the analysis and interpretation beyond the current state-of-the-art. Ultimately, NEMESIS brings big data techniques and hybrid machine learning methods to systematically analyze and interpret large data volumes in order to answer some of the most persisting questions, paving the path toward data intensive science applications in modern astrophysics.
NEMESIS is an EU Horizon 2020/SPACE-funded project that was launched in March 2021 with a scheduled duration of 48 months. It represents a collaboration between the Department of Astrophysics at University of Vienna (coordinating institute), the University of Geneva, and the Konkoly Observatory.