Using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, Ray Norris plans to carry out the
Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) survey to investigate radio sources in the sky. Although
2.5 million radio sources are already known, EMU expects to take on another 70 million more.
With the immense amounts of data
LSST will produce nightly, it will be
essential for researchers to stay on top of
the imagery. For this, LSST scientists
have developed systems that automati-
cally process images by looking for differ-
ences between two exposures of the same
section of the sky that were taken at dif-
ferent times. This automation will allow
any changes to be noticed within a min-
ute. However, the road to understanding
the flagged events will still require hours
upon hours of analysis.
“We need to develop these tools so that
they can operate on these quadrillions of
numbers,” says Ivezić. “Today we have
these tools if you want to apply them to
millions or even billions of objects. But if
you want to scale them up by a factor of a
thousand, it’s not a trivial thing. These
tools can mean the difference between
amorphous piles of ones and zeros and
potentially paradigm-shifting discoveries.”
Crowdsourcing astronomy
Astronomers have determined that as
many as 400 billion stars exist in our gal-
axy, while likely hundreds of billions of
galaxies exist in the observable universe.
And, with the help of new large-scale
surveys, these numbers could keep grow-
ing. Thanks to computers, scientists no
longer have to hand-count dots on pho-
tographic plates. But even with machines,
there is still far more data out there than
any scientific cohort, no matter how
dedicated, can tackle.
34
A ST R O N O M Y • MAY 2018
Enlisting the public’s help in scientific
endeavours dates back more than a cen-
tury to birdwatchers tracking aviary
migration patterns across North
America. But it wasn’t until the rise of the
internet and the online gaming culture
that citizen science projects really took
off. The idea is simple: Engage the public
by having them explore real images to
identify simple objects or patterns in a
fun, gamelike way. With citizen science,
the types of routine analyses that would
typically require months of work by a few
scientists can now be done by many more
science enthusiasts at their leisure.
One of the first groups to enlist the
public’s help at the data processing stage
was a team of scientists at NASA’s Ames
Research Center. Using data collected by
the Viking orbiters, which were sent to
Mars in the 1970s, the team developed
ClickWorkers, an online site where the
public could identify and map craters on
the martian surface, in 2000. The initial
results showed the public was both enthu-
siastic about helping and capable of per-
forming tasks accurately. Soon after, the
project was expanded.
“The majority of people participated
because they wanted to be a part of
research,” says Lucy Fortson, an astro-
physicist at the University of Minnesota
who has worked extensively with citizen
science projects. “They felt that they
wanted to do something meaningful with
their extra time.”
Today there are numerous citizen sci-
ence projects in astronomy, such as
CosmoQuest, Milky Way Project, and
perhaps most famously, Galaxy Zoo. In
Same size, different sight
Primary mirror
diameter
Field of view
8m-class telescope
0.2°
8 m
LSST
Full Moon
is 0.5°
8.4 m
3.5°
A comparison of the field of views for a typical 8-meter-class telescope and the uniquely designed
Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). LSST CORPORATION; ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY