The Astro Virtual Lab is an AI-human collaboration platform for astronomical research adapted from the brilliant work of Kyle Swanson with Virtual Lab @Stanford [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.11.623004v1.full.pdf]. The Virtual Lab is available here: https://github.com/zou-group/virtual-lab. In this Astro-Human Lab, a human researcher works with a team of large language model (LLM) agents to perform astronomical research and data analysis. Interaction between the human researcher and the LLM agents occurs via a series of team meetings, where all the LLM agents discuss a scientific agenda posed by the human researcher, and individual meetings, where the human researcher interacts with a single LLM agent to solve particular astronomical tasks.

The Astro Virtual Lab will be equipped with powerful tools for astronomical research:

• Data analysis and visualization using standard astronomy packages (astropy, matplotlib)
• Access to astronomical databases and catalogs through astroquery
• Image processing capabilities with photutils
• Spectral analysis tools with specutils
• Solar physics research capabilities with sunpy
• Machine learning applications in astronomy with astroML

The Astro Virtual Lab can be installed using pip or by cloning the repo and installing the required packages. Installation should only take a couple of minutes.

Optionally, first create a conda environment:

conda create -y -n astro_virtual_lab python=3.12
conda activate astro_virtual_lab

Install via pip:

pip install astro-virtual-lab

For additional astronomy-specific functionality, install with optional dependencies:

pip install "astro-virtual-lab[astronomy]"

In the future, the Astro Virtual Lab can be used for various astronomical research tasks such as:

• Analyzing astronomical images and spectra
• Querying astronomical databases
• Processing and analyzing observational data
• Performing statistical analysis of astronomical datasets
• Applying machine learning to astronomical problems

Example notebooks demonstrating these capabilities will be available in the examples directory.