Title: Generative Adversarial Networks recover features in astrophysical images of galaxies beyond the deconvolution limit,
Abstract: Observations of astrophysical objects such as galaxies are limited by various
sources of random and systematic noise from the sky background, the optical
system of the telescope and the detector used to record the data. Conventional
deconvolution techniques are limited in their ability to recover features in
imaging data by the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem. Here we train a
generative adversarial network (GAN) on a sample of $4,550$ images of nearby
galaxies at $0.01<z<0.02$ from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and conduct
$10\times$ cross validation to evaluate the results. We present a method using
a GAN trained on galaxy images that can recover features from artificially
degraded images with worse seeing and higher noise than the original with a
performance which far exceeds simple deconvolution. The ability to better
recover detailed features such as galaxy morphology from low-signal-to-noise
and low angular resolution imaging data significantly increases our ability to
study existing data sets of astrophysical objects as well as future
observations with observatories such as the Large Synoptic Sky Telescope (LSST)
and the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.