CACR Seminar: “Making and using VO tools to study the QSO distribution”

1:00PM
Monday November 10, 2008
Powell-Booth 100 (Seminar Room)

Giuseppe Longo
Department of Physics – University Federico II in Naples, Italy
INAF – Napoli

Due to the huge amount of data gathered by the large optical surveys and by a new generation of space borne experiments, astronomy has become a very data rich science. The exploitation of the huge amount of information contained in the astronomical archives, which has been federated and made accessible to the community through the International Virtual Observatory (VO) infrastructure, calls for the adoption of Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA) methods and tools which allow to extract patterns and trends in an almost automatic way and can find application in almost all fields of observational astronomy. The talk is therefore divided in two parts: the first one is devoted to describe how and why in the coming decades, IDA methodologies will play an increasing role in astronomy but not only. The second part will discuss the preliminary results of a Euro-VO template science case, concerning the evaluation of photometric redshifts for SDSS galaxies and QSOs and the identification of quasar candidates from combined UKIDS and SDSS data.