A Universe of Astronomical Data

“After a decade of developing the tools and infrastructure needed to get these databases to talk to each other, the project, now called the Virtual Astronomical Observatory and funded by NASA and the NSF, opened for business in May. “We’re moving onto the operational phase,” says [Matthew] Graham, a member of the program council of the VAO. “The hope is that we can really make an impact on the community.” In addition to Graham, CACR computational scientist Roy Williams also plays a leading role with the VAO.”

The stream will be broadcast live at http://twitter.com/skyalert with the tag #SantaAlert, at http://skyalert.org/santa, and also through the Skyalert page on Facebook. Tell your friends!

SkyAlert collects and distributes reports of astronomical transients in near-real time. When looking deeply and frequently, the sky is full of explosions and movement. Examples of such transients include Supernovae, Cataclysmic Variables, Gamma-ray Bursts, and Blazar Eruption, and the discovery rate of such transients is increasing rapidly as new surveys come online. For further information about Skyalert visit http://www.skyalert.org.

A bright supernova discovered by CRTS within the interacting Antennae galaxies. Click for larger images.

CACR is pleased to announce that an award of $890,000 from the National Science Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Grants Program was made to the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS) project. The CRTS is based on the special processing and analysis of a data stream from the ongoing NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS), which is cataloging near-earth objects and potential planetary hazard asteroids.  The CRTS leverages this existing data stream to discover and study objects and phenomena outside the solar system, opening a new discovery space for time-domain astrophysics at a greatly reduced cost. This project will provide a steady open stream of astronomical events, available to the entire community in real-time. This will be the first and only fully open synoptic sky survey data and event stream.

Exploration of the time domain – discovery and study of objects and phenomena changing on time scales ranging from seconds to years – is now one of the most exciting and rapidly growing fields of astronomy, touching on a broad and diverse spectrum of research areas, from the solar system and discoveries of extra-solar planets to the distant quasars, and from stellar astrophysics to cosmology and extreme relativistic astrophysics. Time domain information is essential for understanding some of the most interesting phenomena we observe. For example, we could not learn anything from a single picture of a supernova, or a single snapshot of a gamma-ray burst: the variability of stars aids to our understanding of their structure and evolution, motions of stars tell us about the structure of our galaxy, and so on.

The CRTS project is already making significant scientific discoveries. For example, CRTS recently found the most energetic supernova ever seen. This event appears to be an example of an extremely rare pair-instabilty supernova. The survey will aid the entire astronomical community in developing new scientific strategies and procedures in the area of large synoptic sky surveys, and develop further and exercise time-domain astronomy cyber-infrastructure within existing Virtual Observatory (VO) environment and framework.

Representing CACR’s expertise in time-domain astronomy, research scientist Andrew Drake created and manages the process for real-time data filtering and analysis, mining through the CSS data for astrophysical transients. Scientific areas of interest include beamed active galactic nuclei (blazars), unusual types of supernovae, fast transients, and an organized serendipitous approach to the discovery of new types of objects and phenomena. More information about the project can be found on the CRTS website.

CS Lunch Bunch
Tuesday, April 21st
12:00 – 1:00pm
74 Jorgensen

~OR~

IPAC Colloquium
Wednesday, April 22nd
12:00 – 1:00pm
Morrisroe Large Conference Room, IPAC

There is a waterfall coming of astronomical surveys that discover change in the sky, and the data rates are of course exponentiating. Such transient events may be supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, cataclysmic variables, blazar eruptions, etc. To understand the astrophysics of these rapid followup observation is needed, and as rates increase, decisions will of necessity be made by automated systems. I will present a prototype of such a system.
More information about Skyalert: http://www.skyalert.org

10 AM
Raffaele D’Abrusco
(Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Naples)

“A data mining approach to selection and photometric redshift estimation of candidate quasars”

The talk will describe a data mining approach to the problems of the selection of candidate quasars from the photometric data produced by astronomical surveys and the estimation of photometric redshifts for the candidate QSOs extracted. Some details of the algorithms employed as well as the results of their application to SDSS and near infrared data will also be presented.

10:30 AM
Omar Laurino
(Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Naples)

“VONeural 2.0/DAME: an integrated data mining framework for massive datasets”

Semantic astronomy promises to expand the scientific discovery potential of exponentially growing data collections by enabling natural language querying, content-based searching, rich metadata markup and retrieval, rapid integration of diverse data collections, and machine-assisted scientific discovery.

Practical Semantic Astronomy 2009 is the second in a series of workshops first held at Caltech in February 2008.  The workshop brings together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these techniques to address current problems in astroinformatics.

The Virtual Observatory is a loose planet-wide collaboration of astronomy computing projects, aiming to make available the high-volume and rich data of astronomy.  Although astronomical data is generally
well-described, it is very dispersed, so that there is a substantial data-discovery and integration problem, making it fertile ground for the sorts of semantic approaches applied with such success in other
disciplines.

In SemAst 2009, we will pair keynote speakers and astronomical use-cases, focusing broad expertise on challenging and exciting problems in astroinformatics. The keynotes will comprise of:

• Danny Ayers, Talis, UK
• Peter Fox, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
• Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Amedeo Napoli, LORIA, France
• Joel Sachs, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
• +1 to be confirmed

Topics of Interest

• Astronomy and solar ontologies
• Knowledgebases
• Metadata for astronomical databases
• Semantic integration
• Semantic queries and data mining
• Semantic technologies

Submission

Submissions should be in the form of an extended abstract of no more than 1 page. Abstracts should be submitted electronically with the EasyChair system.

Important Dates

• Abstract Submissions: 4 January 2009
• Paper Notification: 16 January 2009
• Early-bird Registration: 31 January 2009
• Workshop: 2-5 March 2009

Organizers

• Alasdair J G Gray, University of Glasgow, UK
• Norman Gray, University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK
• Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow, UK
• Jon Ritchie, University of Glasgow, UK

Scientific Organizing Committee

• Norman Gray (Chair), University of Leicester/University of Glasgow, UK
• Kirk Borne, George Mason University, USA
• Doug Burke, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA
• Sebastien Derriere, Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, France
• Matthew Graham, California Institute of Technology, USA
• Bob Mann, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, UK

Further Information

More information is available from the web site
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/
or by email to semast09 at dcs.gla.ac.uk

The basic layer of the sky images used is derived from the digital versions of the sky surveys conducted by astronomers in the 1980’s and 1990’s, at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in the North, and at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in the South. The Palomar data was reprocessed at CACR before being sent to Google. Google’s technology enables the creation of layers, where a collection of particularly interesting points on the sky can be saved as a KML file, and displayed over the viewing area.

Scientists at CACR released such a layer today, as a part of the VOEventNet project. The VOEventNet layer provides real time updates of locations of two types of transient events on the sky: cosmic gamma-ray bursts, and so-called gravitational microlensing events. The gamma-ray bursts are spectacular explosions believed to be caused by the death of massive stars, as they collapse to produce black holes. The VOEventNet team plans to expand their layer to include other types of astronomical events and transient phenomena on the sky.

Read more at the Caltech press release, see also the VOEventNet website.

VOEventNet will enable an already active area of astrophysical research to flourish. The system is not just research with the hope of a prototype, but the unification of existing powerful resources to form a new, robust, competent production system that will generate a great deal of new science. VOEventNet is a network of telescopes and computers working synergistically, under the watchful eye of humans, to find and study interesting astronomical events. VOEventNet is a transportation of events to interested subscribers, automatically in seconds or minutes after discovery. For more information about the project, please see the project website.

Scientists working to create the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), an online portal for astronomical research unifying dozens of large astronomical databases, confirmed discovery of the new brown dwarf recently.

More at the NVO website…