test 1 Astronomy - May 2018 USA | Page 34

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