Joshua S. Bloom, J. Xavier Prochaska, William Lee, J. Jesús González, Enrico Ramírez-Ruiz, Michael Bolte, José Franco, José Guichard, Alberto Carramiñana, Peter… 展开作者
Joshua S. Bloom, J. Xavier Prochaska, William Lee, J. Jesús González, Enrico Ramírez-Ruiz, Michael Bolte, José Franco, José Guichard, Alberto Carramiñana, Peter Strittmatter, Vladimir Avila-Reese, Rebecca Bernstein, Bruce Bigelow, Mark Brodwin, Adam Burgasser, Nat Butler, Miguel Chávez, Bethany Cobb, Kem Cook, Irene Cruz-González, José Antonio de Diego, Alejandro Farah, Leonid Georgiev, Julien Girard, Hector Hernández-Toledo, Elena Jiménez-Bailón, Yair Krongold, Divakara Mayya, Juan Meza, Takamitsu Miyaji, Raúl Mújica, Peter Nugent, Alicia Porras, Dovi Poznanski, Alejandro Raga, Michael Richer, Lino Rodríguez, Daniel Rosa, Adam Stanford, Andrew Szentgyorgyi, Guillermo Tenorio-Tagle, Rollin Thomas, Octavio Valenzuela, Alan M. Watson, Peter Wehinger
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Revised version of submitted whitepaper to the "Optical and IR Astronomy from the Ground" Program Prioritization Panel of the Astro2010 Decadal Survey; 23 pages
We are proposing to conduct a multicolor, synoptic infrared (IR) imaging survey of the Northern sky with a new, dedicated 6.5-meter telescope at San Pedro Mártir (SPM) Observatory. This initiative is being developed in partnership with astronomy institutions in Mexico and the University of California. The 4-year, dedicated survey, planned to begin in 2017, will reach more than 100 times deeper than 2MASS. The Synoptic All-Sky Infrared (SASIR) Survey will reveal the missing sample of faint red dwarf stars in the local solar neighborhood, and the unprecedented sensitivity over such a wide field will result in the discovery of thousands of z ~ 7 quasars (and reaching to z > 10), allowing detailed study (in concert with JWST and Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes) of the timing and the origin(s) of reionization. As a time-domain survey, SASIR will reveal the dynamic infrared universe, opening new phase space for discovery. Synoptic observations of over 10^6 supernovae and variable stars will provide better distance measures than optical studies alone. SASIR also provides significant synergy with other major Astro2010 facilities, improving the overall scientific return of community investments. Compared to optical-only measurements, IR colors vastly improve photometric redshifts to z ~ 4, enhancing dark energy and dark matter surveys based on weak lensing and baryon oscillations. The wide field and ToO capabilities will enable a connection of the gravitational wave and neutrino universe - with events otherwise poorly localized on the sky - to transient electromagnetic phenomena.
An automated, rapid classification of transient events detected in the modern synoptic sky surveys is essential for their scientific utility and effective follow-up using scarce resources. This problem will grow by orders of magnitude with the next generation of surveys. We are exploring a variety of novel automated classification techniques, mostly Bayesian, to respond to these challenges, using the ongoing CRTS sky survey as a testbed. We describe briefly some of the methods used.
Synoptic sky surveys are becoming the largest data generators in astronomy, and they are opening a new research frontier, that touches essentially every field of astronomy. Opening of the time domain to a systematic exploration will strengthen our understanding of a number of interesting known phenomena, and may lead to the discoveries of as yet unknown ones. We describe some lessons learned over the past decade, and offer some ideas that may guide strategic considerations in planning and execution of the future synoptic sky surveys.
Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope construction, detectors, and information technology, has had a dramatic impact on nearly all fields of astronomy, and areas of fundamental physics. The next-generation instruments, and the surveys that will be made with them, will maintain this revolutionary progress. The hardware and computational technical challenges and the exciting science opportunities are …
We describe the development of a system for an automated, iterative, real-time classification of transient events discovered in synoptic sky surveys. The system under development incorporates a number of Machine Learning techniques, mostly using Bayesian approaches, due to the sparse nature, heterogeneity, and variable incompleteness of the available data. The classifications are improved iteratively as the new measurements are obtained. One novel feature is the development of an automated follow-up recommendation engine, that suggest those measurements that would be the most advantageous in t…
In the last decade a new generation of telescopes and sensors has allowed the production of a very large amount of data and astronomy has become, a data-rich science; this transition is often labeled as: "data revolution" and "data tsunami". The first locution puts emphasis on the expectations of the astronomers while the second stresses, instead, the dramatic problem arising from this large amount of data: which is no longer computable with traditional approaches to data storage, data reduction and data analysis. In a new, age new instruments are necessary, as it happened in the Bronze age wh…
The nature of scientific and technological data collection is evolving rapidly: data volumes and rates grow exponentially, with increasing complexity and information content, and there has been a transition from static data sets to data streams that must be analyzed in real time. Interesting or anomalous phenomena must be quickly characterized and followed up with additional measurements via optimal deployment of limited assets. Modern astronomy presents a variety of such phenomena in the form of transient events in digital synoptic sky surveys, including cosmic explosions (supernovae, gamma r…
The nature of scientific and technological data collection is evolving rapidly: data volumes and rates grow exponentially, with increasing complexity and information content, and there has been a transition from static data sets to data streams that must be analyzed in real time. Interesting or anomalous phenomena must be quickly characterized and followed up with additional measurements via optimal deployment of limited assets. Modern astronomy presents a variety of such phenomena in the form of transient events in digital synoptic sky surveys, including cosmic explosions (supernovae, gamma r…
KMTNet Synoptic Survey of Southern Sky II: Data Reduction and Real-Time Transient Detection Pipeline
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Daegu National Science Museum（大邱国立科学博物馆）；Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute（韩国天文学与空间科学研究院）；University of Hawaii（夏威夷大学）
本文介绍KMTNet南天全景巡天数据释放1的图像处理流水线，涵盖数据质量保证、天体测量、光度零点校准等核心方法，实现亚像素精度的天体测量和22-23 AB mag的5西格玛深度。
KMTNet Synoptic Survey of Southern Sky III: The First Data Release
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Daegu National Science Museum（大邱国立科学馆）；University of Cape Town（开普敦大学）；South African Astronomical Observatory（南非天文台）；University of the Free State（自由邦大学）；Swinburne University of Technology（斯威本科技大学）；ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)（ARC引力波发现卓越中心（OzGrav））；Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute（韩国天文学与空间科学研究所）
The rate of image acquisition in modern synoptic imaging surveys has already begun to outpace the feasibility of keeping astronomers in the real-time discovery and classification loop. Here we present the inner workings of a framework, based on machine-learning algorithms, that captures expert training and ground-truth knowledge about the variable and transient sky to automate 1) the process of discovery on image differences and, 2) the generation of preliminary science-type classifications of discovered sources. Since follow-up resources for extracting novel science from fast-changing transie…
In this paper we estimate the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) yield of eclipsing binary stars, which will survey ~20,000 square degrees of the southern sky during the period of 10 years in 6 photometric passbands to r ~ 24.5. We generate a set of 10,000 eclipsing binary light curves sampled to the LSST time cadence across the whole sky, with added noise as a function of apparent magnitude. This set is passed to the Analysis of Variance (AoV) period finder to assess the recoverability rate for the periods, and the successfully phased light curves are passed to the artificial intelligence…
The direct detection of binary systems in wide-field surveys is limited by the size of the stars' point-spread-functions (PSFs). A search for elongated objects can find closer companions, but is limited by the precision to which the PSF shape can be calibrated for individual stars. We have developed the BinaryFinder algorithm to search for close binaries by using precision measurements of PSF ellipticity across wide-field survey images. We show that the algorithm is capable of reliably detecting binary systems down to approximately 1/5 of the seeing limit, and can directly measure the systems'…
How ground-based telescopes schedule their observations in response to competing science priorities and constraints, variations in the weather, and the visibility of a particular part of the sky can significantly impact their efficiency. In this paper we introduce the Feature-Based telescope scheduler that is an automated, proposal-free decision making algorithm that offers \textit{controllability} of the behavior, \textit{adjustability} of the mission, and quick \textit{recoverability} from interruptions for large ground-based telescopes. By framing this scheduler in the context of a coherent…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be a ground-based, optical, all-sky, rapid cadence survey project with tremendous potential for discovering and characterizing asteroids. With LSST's large 6.5m diameter primary mirror, a wide 9.6 square degree field of view 3.2 Gigapixel camera, and rapid observational cadence, LSST will discover more than 5 million asteroids over its ten year survey lifetime. With a single visit limiting magnitude of 24.5 in r-band, LSST will be able to detect asteroids in the Main Belt down to sub-kilometer sizes. The current strawman for the LSST survey strat…
Light Echoes (LEs) are the reflections of astrophysical transients off of interstellar dust. They are fascinating astronomical phenomena that enable studies of the scattering dust as well as of the original transients. LEs, however, are rare and extremely difficult to detect as they appear as faint, diffuse, time-evolving features. The detection of LEs still largely relies on human inspection of images, a method unfeasible in the era of large synoptic surveys. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, LSST, will generate an unprecedented amount of astronomical imaging data…
Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS) is a synoptic sky survey uses data streams from 3 wide-field telescopes in Arizona and Australia, covering the total area of ~30,000 deg2, down to the limiting magnitudes ~ 20 - 21 mag per exposure, with time baselines from 10 min to 6 years (and growing); there are now typically ~ 200 - 300 exposures per pointing, and coadded images reach deeper than 23 mag. The basic goal of CRTS is a systematic exploration and characterization of the faint, variable sky. The survey has detected ~ 3,000 high-amplitude transients to date, including ~ 1,000 supernovae…
Time domain science forms an increasing fraction of astronomical programs at many facilities. Synoptic and targeted observing modes of transient, varying, and moving sources rely on precise clocks to provide the underlying time tags. Often precision is mistaken for accuracy, or the precise time signals never reach the instrumentation in the first place. We will discuss issues of deploying a stable high-precision GNSS clock on a remote mountaintop, and of conveying the resulting time signals to a computer in a way that permits hardware timestamping of the camera shutter (or equivalent) rather t…
Modern time-domain surveys continuously monitor large swaths of the sky to look for astronomical variability. Astrophysical discovery in such data sets is complicated by the fact that detections of real transient and variable sources are highly outnumbered by bogus detections caused by imperfect subtractions, atmospheric effects and detector artefacts. In this work we present a machine learning (ML) framework for discovery of variability in time-domain imaging surveys. Our ML methods provide probabilistic statements, in near real time, about the degree to which each newly observed source is as…
The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) is a synoptic sky survey in operation since 2009. PTF utilizes a 7.1 square degree camera on the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt telescope to survey the sky primarily at a single wavelength (R-band) at a rate of 1000-3000 square degrees a night. The data are used to detect and study transient and moving objects such as gamma ray bursts, supernovae and asteroids, as well as variable phenomena such as quasars and Galactic stars. The data processing system at IPAC handles realtime processing and detection of transients, solar system object processing, high photometric …
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) surveys have initially been optimized to omit the inner part of the Milky Way disk/bar from deep and cadence observations. However it is now clear that the LSST will be powerful for Galactic astronomy and may play a crucial role in continuing to extend the Gaia astrometric catalog until a future satellite, either optical or IR, carries on. LSST will provide metallicities and kinematics for the bulge, and will map halo structures to as distant as 450 kpc, nearly half the distance to the Andromeda galaxy. Thanks to the unprecedented calibration effort f…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an 8-m optical ground-based telescope being constructed on Cerro Pachon in Chile. LSST will survey half the sky every few nights in six optical bands. The data will be transferred to NCSA and within 60 seconds they will be reduced using difference imaging techniques and detected transients will be announced to the community in the VOEvent format. Annual data releases will be made from all the data during the 10-year mission, with unprecedented depth of coadds and time resolution of catalogs for such a large region of sky. In this paper we present t…
Many synoptic surveys are observing large parts of the sky multiple times. The resulting lightcurves provide a wonderful window to the dynamic nature of the universe. However, there are many significant challenges in analyzing these light curves. These include heterogeneity of the data, irregularly sampled data, missing data, censored data, known but variable measurement errors, and most importantly, the need to classify in astronomical objects in real time using these imperfect light curves. We describe a modeling-based approach using Gaussian process regression for generating critical measur…
A number of synoptic sky surveys are underway or being planned. Typically they are done with small telescopes and relatively short exposure times. A search for transient or variable sources involves comparison with deeper baseline images, ideally obtained through the same telescope and camera. With that in mind we have stacked images from the 0.68~m Schmidt telescope on Mt. Bigelow taken over ten years as part of the Catalina Sky Survey. In order to generate deep reference images for the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey, close to 0.8 million images over 8000 fields and covering over 27000~s…
Existing and future wide-field photometric surveys will produce a time-lapse movie of the sky that will revolutionize our census of variable and moving astronomical and atmospheric phenomena. As with any revolution in scientific measurement capability, this new species of data will also present us with results that are sure to surprise and confound our understanding of the cosmos. While we cannot predict the unknown yields of such endeavors, it is a beneficial exercise to explore certain parameter spaces using reasonable assumptions for rates and observability. To this end I present a simple p…
A robust and extended characterization of the point spread function (PSF) is crucial to extract the photometric information produced by deep imaging surveys. Here, we present the extended PSFs of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), one of the most productive astronomical surveys of all time. By stacking ~1000 images of individual stars with different brightness, we obtain the bidimensional SDSS PSFs extending over 8 arcmin in radius for all the SDSS filters(u, g, r, i, z). This new characterization of the SDSS PSFs is near a factor of 10 larger in extension than previous PSFs characterization…
Astronomy has been at the forefront of the development of the techniques and methodologies of data intensive science for over a decade with large sky surveys and distributed efforts such as the Virtual Observatory. However, it faces a new data deluge with the next generation of synoptic sky surveys which are opening up the time domain for discovery and exploration. This brings both new scientific opportunities and fresh challenges, in terms of data rates from robotic telescopes and exponential complexity in linked data, but also for data mining algorithms used in classification and decision ma…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) simulator being built by Andy Connolly and collaborators is an impressive undertaking and should make working with LSST in the beginning stages far more easy than it was initially with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. However, I would like to focus on an equally important problem that has not yet been discussed here, but in the coming years the community will need to address -- can we deal with the flood of data from LSST and will we need to rethink the way we work?
An automated, rapid classification of transient events detected in the modern synoptic sky surveys is essential for their scientific utility and effective follow-up using scarce resources. This presents some unusual challenges: the data are sparse, heterogeneous and incomplete; evolving in time; and most of the relevant information comes not from the data stream itself, but from a variety of archival data and contextual information (spatial, temporal, and multi-wavelength). We are exploring a variety of novel techniques, mostly Bayesian, to respond to these challenges, using the ongoing CRTS s…
The use of high-quality simulated sky catalogs is essential for the success of cosmological surveys. The catalogs have diverse applications, such as investigating signatures of fundamental physics in cosmological observables, understanding the effect of systematic uncertainties on measured signals and testing mitigation strategies for reducing these uncertainties, aiding analysis pipeline development and testing, and survey strategy optimization. The list of applications is growing with improvements in the quality of the catalogs and the details that they can provide. Given the importance of s…
A foundational goal of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to map the Solar System small body populations that provide key windows into understanding of its formation and evolution. This is especially true of the populations of the Outer Solar System -- objects at the orbit of Neptune $r > 30$AU and beyond. In this whitepaper, we propose a minimal change to the LSST cadence that can greatly enhance LSST's ability to discover faint distant Solar System objects across the entire wide-fast-deep (WFD) survey area. Specifically, we propose that the WFD cadence be constrained so as to deli…
The Argus Optical Array is a synoptic survey observatory, currently in development, that will have a total collecting area equivalent to a 5-meter monolithic telescope and an all-sky field of view, multiplexed from 900 commercial off-the-shelf telescopes. The Array will observe 7916 deg$^2$ every second during high-speed operations ($m_g\leq16.1$) and every 30 seconds at base cadence ($m_g\leq19.1$), producing 4.3 PB and 145 TB respectively of data per night with its 55-gigapixel mosaic of cameras. The Argus Array Hierarchical Data Processing System (Argus-HDPS) is the instrument control and a…
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 metho…
Making an inventory of the Solar System is one of the four fundamental science requirements for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The current baseline footprint for LSST's main Wide-Fast-Deep (WFD) Survey observes the sky below 0$^\circ$ declination, which includes only half of the ecliptic plane. Critically, key Solar System populations are asymmetrically distributed on the sky: they will be entirely missed, or only partially mapped, if only the WFD occurs. We propose a Northern Ecliptic Spur (NES) mini survey, observing the northern sky up to +10$^\circ$ ecliptic latitude, to maxim…
The Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) is a synoptic, all-sky radio sky survey with a unique combination of high angular resolution ($\approx$2.5"), sensitivity (a 1$σ$ goal of 70 $μ$Jy/beam in the coadded data), full linear Stokes polarimetry, time domain coverage, and wide bandwidth (2-4 GHz). The first observations began in September 2017, and observing for the survey will finish in 2024. VLASS will use approximately 5500 hours of time on the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to cover the whole sky visible to the VLA (Declination $>-40^{\circ}$), a total of 33,885 deg$^2$. The data wil…
With growing data volumes from synoptic surveys, astronomers must become more abstracted from the discovery and introspection processes. Given the scarcity of follow-up resources, there is a particularly sharp onus on the frameworks that replace these human roles to provide accurate and well-calibrated probabilistic classification catalogs. Such catalogs inform the subsequent follow-up, allowing consumers to optimize the selection of specific sources for further study and permitting rigorous treatment of purities and efficiencies for population studies. Here, we describe a process to produce a…
We apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify and detect quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82 and also to predict the photometric redshifts of quasars. The network takes the variability of objects into account by converting light curves into images. The width of the images, noted w, corresponds to the five magnitudes ugriz and the height of the images, noted h, represents the date of the observation. The CNN provides good results since its precision is 0.988 for a recall of 0.90, compared to a precision of 0.985 for the same recall with a random forest classifier. More…
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory in central Mexico is currently the world's only synoptic survey instrument for gamma rays above 1 TeV. Because there is significant interest in covering the full TeV sky with a survey instrument, we have examined options for a Southern Hemisphere extension to HAWC. In addition to providing all-sky coverage of TeV sources, a southern site could complement existing surveys of the densest part of the Galactic Plane, provide continuous monitoring of Galactic and extragalactic transient sources in both Hemispheres, and simplify the analysis of sp…
Millennium Institute of Astrophysics（千禧天体物理研究所）；Universidad de Chile（智利大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Universidad de los Andes（智利洛斯安第斯大学）
Time-domain astronomy (TDA) is facing a paradigm shift caused by the exponential growth of the sample size, data complexity and data generation rates of new astronomical sky surveys. For example, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will begin operations in northern Chile in 2022, will generate a nearly 150 Petabyte imaging dataset of the southern hemisphere sky. The LSST will stream data at rates of 2 Terabytes per hour, effectively capturing an unprecedented movie of the sky. The LSST is expected not only to improve our understanding of time-varying astrophysical objects, but al…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies（海德堡理论研究所）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学尔湾分校）
We provide a brief, and inevitably incomplete overview of the use of Machine Learning (ML) and other AI methods in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. Astronomy entered the big data era with the first digital sky surveys in the early 1990s and the resulting Terascale data sets, which required automating of many data processing and analysis tasks, for example the star-galaxy separation, with billions of feature vectors in hundreds of dimensions. The exponential data growth continued, with the rise of synoptic sky surveys and the Time Domain Astronomy, with the resulting Petascale data strea…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an ambitious astronomical survey with a similarly ambitious Data Management component. Data Management for LSST includes processing on both nightly and yearly cadences to generate transient alerts, deep catalogs of the static sky, and forced photometry light-curves for billions of objects at hundreds of epochs, spanning at least a decade. The algorithms running in these pipelines are individually sophisticated and interact in subtle ways. This paper provides an overview of those pipelines, focusing more on those interactions than the details of any…
Current synoptic sky surveys monitor large areas of the sky to find variable and transient astronomical sources. As the number of detections per night at a single telescope easily exceeds several thousand, current detection pipelines make intensive use of machine learning algorithms to classify the detected objects and to filter out the most interesting candidates. A number of upcoming surveys will produce up to three orders of magnitude more data, which renders high-precision classification systems essential to reduce the manual and, hence, expensive vetting by human experts. We present an ap…
Traditional searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) or "technosignatures" focus on dedicated observations of single stars or regions in the sky to detect excess or transient emission from intelligent sources. The newest generation of synoptic time domain surveys enable an entirely new approach: spatio-temporal SETI, where technosignatures may be discovered from spatially resolved sources or multiple stars over time. Current optical time domain surveys such as ZTF and the Evryscope can probe 10-100 times more of the "Cosmic Haystack" parameter space volume than many radio SETI investi…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the next-generation optical imaging survey sited at Cerro Pachon in Chile, will provide an unprecedented database of astronomical measurements. The LSST design, with an 8.4m (6.7m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 sq. deg. field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera, will allow about 10,000 sq. deg. of sky to be covered twice per night, every three to four nights on average, with typical 5-sigma depth for point sources of $r$=24.5 (AB). With over 800 observations in $ugrizy$ bands over a 10-year period, these data will enable a deep stack reaching $r$=2…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) was revolutionary because of the extraordinary breadth and ambition of its optical imaging and spectroscopy. We argue that a 'sub-millimeter SDSS' - a sensitive large-area imaging+spectroscopic survey in the sub-mm window - will revolutionize our understanding of galaxy evolution in the early Universe. By detecting the thermal dust continuum emission and atomic and molecular line emission of galaxies out to z~10 it will be possible to measure the redshifts, star formation rates, dust and gas content of hundreds of thousands of high-z galaxies down to ~L*. Ma…
To maximize the discovery potential of future synoptic surveys, especially in the field of transient science, it will be necessary to use automatic classification to identify some of the astronomical sources. The data mining technique of supervised classification is suitable for this problem. Here, we present a supervised learning method to automatically classify variable X-ray sources in the second \textit{XMM-Newton} serendipitous source catalog (2XMMi-DR2). Random Forest is our classifier of choice since it is one of the most accurate learning algorithms available. Our training set consists…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a large-aperture, wide-field, ground-based survey system that will image the sky in six optical bands from 320 to 1050 nm, uniformly covering approximately $18,000$deg$^2$ of the sky over 800 times. The LSST is currently under construction on Cerro Pachón in Chile, and expected to enter operations in 2022. Once operational, the LSST will explore a wide range of astrophysical questions, from discovering "killer" asteroids to examining the nature of Dark Energy. The LSST will generate on average 15 TB of data per night, and will require a comprehensi…
The digital revolution is transforming astronomy from a data-starved to a data-submerged science. Instruments such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will measure their accumulated data in petabytes. The capacity to produce enormous volumes of data must be matched with the computing power to process that data and produce meaningful results. In addition to handling huge data rates, we need adaptive calibration and beamforming to handle atmospheric fluctuations and radio frequency interference, and to pro…
Modern astronomical surveys such as the Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) promise an unprecedented wealth of discoveries, delivered in the form of ~10 million alerts of time-variable events per night. Astronomers are faced with the daunting challenge of identifying the most scientifically important events from this flood of data in order to conduct effective and timely follow-up observations. Several ongoing observing programs have proven databases to be extremely valuable in conducting efficient follow-up, particularly when combined with tools to select targets, submit observation requests dir…
UVEX is a proposed medium class Explorer mission designed to provide crucial missing capabilities that will address objectives central to a broad range of modern astrophysics. The UVEX design has two co-aligned wide-field imagers operating in the FUV and NUV and a powerful broadband medium resolution spectrometer. In its two-year baseline mission, UVEX will perform a multi-cadence synoptic all-sky survey 50/100 times deeper than GALEX in the NUV/FUV, cadenced surveys of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, rapid target of opportunity followup, as well as spectroscopic followup of samples of …
