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CACR is pleased to announce an award of $479,100 from the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure for the Skyalert project. Skyalert is an event-driven system to understand and disseminate events that are created from real-time sensors, such as astronomical telescopes that repeatedly scan the sky for change. The number of these astronomical transient detections will grow enormously over the next few years, and rapid follow-up observation will be the key to discovery. This will come from big observatories, small college observatories, and amateur astronomers. Skyalert delivers events from the Catalina Real Time Survey and the NASA SWIFT and Fermi observatories, as well as a dozen other projects that detect astronomical transients. Examples of such transients include supernovae, cataclysmic variables, gamma-ray bursts, blazar eruption, planetary microlensing, and other exciting astrophysics.
Skyalert delivers events in real time via email, Twitter, instant message, and other protocols to observatories that can do rapid follow-up — some completely automatically with no human in the loop. Other event-driven actions can include fetching data to build a data portfolio, and running machine-learning algorithms and classification rules to make better automatic decisions. The intention is for automated systems to make real-time intelligent decisions. Skyalert uses an international standard, VOEvent, enabling participation in the global event infrastructure, exchanging events with other event brokers, such as NASA’s GCN.
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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.
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“Real-Time Astronomy with Skyalert”
Roy Williams,
Center for Advanced Computing Research, Caltech
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
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Matthew Graham, CACR
1pm Friday March 13, 2009
Powell-Booth Room 100
The second Practical Semantic Astronomy Workshop took place last week at the University of Glasgow. The workshop brought together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these technologies to address current problems in astroinformatics. The workshop’s aims were to:
* inform how semantic technologies are being used successfully in other sciences
* reveal what semantic activities are emerging in astronomy
* foster greater communication between groups working in this exciting area
For further information about the workshop and semantic astronomy, see the website at http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/semast09/
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Astronomy Tea Talk(s)
Tuesday, Dec. 16th, 2008
Rm 106 ROBINSON
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”
