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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.”
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Skyalert.org will be distributing Santa Sighting Events via Twitter and Facebook over 24 hours from the morning of Dec 24, 2009. Where in the universe will Santa be next?
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.
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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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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”
