Deeper detection limits in astronomical imaging using self-supervised spatiotemporal denoising

Science, 2026

Yuduo Guo#; Hao Zhang#;Mingyu Li#...Jiamin Wu*; Zheng Cai*; Qionghai Dai*.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady9404

Abstract

The detection limit of astronomical imaging observations is limited by several noise sources. Some of that noise is correlated between neighboring pixels and exposures, so in principle could be learned and corrected. We present the Astronomical Self-supervised Transformer-based Denoising (ASTERIS) algorithm, which integrates spatiotemporal information across multiple exposures. Benchmarking on mock data indicates that ASTERIS improves detection limits by 1.0 magnitude at 90% completeness and purity, while preserving the point spread function and photometric accuracy. Observational validation using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Subaru telescope identifies previously undetectable features, including low-surface-brightness galaxy structures and gravitationally-lensed arcs. Applied to deep JWST images, ASTERIS identifies three times more redshift ≳ 9 galaxy candidates than previous methods, with rest-frame ultraviolet luminosity 1.0 magnitude fainter.