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The central disk of our Milky Way galaxy with the Gemini stellar stream highlighted in the top right of the image. Credit: Andrew Drake/Axel Mellinger
A stream of at least 150 ancient variable stars has been confirmed to extend some 130,000 light years beyond our own galaxy’s stellar halo — on the fringes of the Intergalactic Medium, where aside from hot gas and dark matter, space-time becomes as sparse as the deep Sahara. The confirmation, based on analysis of 10 billion year-old dying RR Lyrae stars in the Gemini constellation, was done by an international team of astronomers, including CACR scientist Andrew Drake, who report their findings in The Astrophysical Journal.
(Read the full story)
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Tools for Data-Intensive Astronomy
a VO Community Day in Los Angeles
Wednesday December 7, 2011
9:00AM – 12:00PM
Location: Hameetman Auditorium, Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is realizing global electronic integration of astronomy data, tools, and services for use by individuals around the world. This new environment of interoperability will facilitate astronomy research with a speed, efficiency, and effectiveness not previously possible, and it will be available to all researchers, independent of their affiliation or access to observing facilities.
During this “VO Day”, aimed at research astronomers, VO experts from the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) – one of many VO projects worldwide – will demonstrate new tools and services for data-intensive astronomy in the context of a range of science use cases and tutorials. These use cases and tutorials, based on recent results from the literature and on-going missions, will include:
- constructing and modeling spectral energy distributions
- cross-matching objects from diverse catalogs
- exploration of time series data
- image analysis tools.
This workshop is organized and sponsored by the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory. The workshop is open to anyone interested, and there is no registration fee. Registration, however, is required – Please visit the websites for registration and further information, including maps & directions.
VAODay@LA: http://www.usvao.org/voday@la
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Students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty are invited to attend a Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) half-day short course entitled:
“Looking for Nuggets in Massive Data Streams”
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
9:00am – 12:30pm
Hameetman Auditorium, Cahill Building
This short course is being held in conjunction with the KISS study “Digging Deeper: Algorithms for Computationally-Limited Searches in Astronomy.”
This series of talks will review some of the tools and techniques used for detection and classification on transient signals in massive data streams in astronomy, e.g., searches for gravitational wave sources, or transient events in synoptic sky surveys. The focus of this short course is on advanced data mining and statistical techniques and algorithms.
Speakers include:
09:15 – 10:15 Signal analysis and parameter estimation in gravitational wave astronomy, Badri Krishnan (AEI)
10:15 – 10:45 Keynote talk: New Developments in Time Series Analysis, Jeff Scargle (NASA Ames)
10:45 – 11:15 Coffee break
11:15 – 11:45 Automated Classification of Transients, Ashish Mahabal (Caltech)
11:45 – 12:15 Machine Learning applications in Time Domain Astronomy, Pavlos Protopapas (CfA)
The short course will be videotaped and made available on the KISS website within two weeks after the workshop is completed.
Seating is limited and is available on a first come, first served basis – and no registration is required. An informal lunch is provided for all short course attendees.
Please see http://www.kiss.caltech.edu for more details.
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CRTS: An Open Optical Transient Survey
Date: Wednesday October 6, 2010 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Location: Cahill Center, Hameetman Auditorium
Andrew Drake, computational scientist, Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
The Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS) is a Caltech operated optical transient survey that covers most of the Northern and Southern sky in search of transient astrophysical phenomena occurring on timescales of minutes to years. The project uses data from the Catalina Sky Survey NEO search and began real-time discovery and publication of transient events in November 2007. CRTS has found thousands of sources ranging from UV Ceti and dwarf nova outbursts to supernovae and Blazars. I will discuss the survey, the discoveries made to date, and our efforts to provide immediate open access to CRTS discoveries and historical CSS data.
* For further information: contact Gina Armas gina@its.caltech.edu phone: 4671
For the full scoop, see event web page: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~gma/colloquia.html.
* Sponsored by: Physics, Math and Astronomy
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Article in Summer 2010 issue of Engineering & Science Magazine about CACR’s participation in Astroinformatics:
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.”
