E-Mail IMAGE: Different shapes of galaxies, left to right: elliptical, lenticular, spiral, and irregular/miscellaneous. view more Credit: Credit: NASA/Hubble (elliptical galaxy M87), ESA/Hubble & NASA (lenticular galaxy NGC 6861 and the colliding Antennae galaxies), and David Dayag (the Andromeda spiral galaxy). Astronomers have designed and trained a computer program which can classify tens of thousands of galaxies in just a few seconds, a task that usually takes months to accomplish. In research published today, astrophysicists from Australia have used machine learning to speed up a process that is often done manually by astronomers and citizen scientists around the world.