{"id":18930,"date":"2017-06-05T18:02:10","date_gmt":"2017-06-05T10:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/uws-dirac-institute-gears-up-for-big-data-from-wide-angle-telescope-surveys\/"},"modified":"2017-06-05T18:02:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T10:02:10","slug":"uws-dirac-institute-gears-up-for-big-data-from-wide-angle-telescope-surveys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/uws-dirac-institute-gears-up-for-big-data-from-wide-angle-telescope-surveys\/","title":{"rendered":"UW\u2019s DIRAC Institute gears up for big data from wide-angle telescope surveys"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_337184\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-337184\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-337184\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/170605-lsst-2-630x415.jpg\" alt=\"LSST\" width=\"630\" height=\"415\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/170605-lsst-2-630x415.jpg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/170605-lsst-2-768x506.jpg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/170605-lsst-2-1260x830.jpg 1260w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-337184\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artwork shows the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope scanning the night sky in Chile. (LSST Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A new data analysis center for what\u2019s expected to be torrents of astronomical imagery is taking shape at the University of Washington.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to contributions&nbsp;from software billionaire Charles Simonyi and other donors, researchers at the Astronomy Department\u2019s DIRAC Institute are getting ready to crunch data from two wide-angle telescope surveys.<\/p>\n<p>The first survey is the Palomar Observatory\u2019s Zwicky Transient Facility, which is due to begin operations&nbsp;in August and will scan the entire accessible sky every night for supernovae and other cosmic outbursts.<\/p>\n<p>The DIRAC Institute will also manage the development of analytical tools for the almost real-time processing of images from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a massive observatory&nbsp;that\u2019s scheduled to start scanning the skies over Chile in 2019.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen the&nbsp;LSST&nbsp;comes online at the end of this decade it will address big questions, from measuring the nature of the dark energy that drives the expansion of our universe to finding asteroids that may one day impact the Earth, providing enough warning that those asteroids\u2019 trajectories can be modified,\u201d the institute\u2019s director, UW astronomer Andrew&nbsp;Connolly,&nbsp;said last year in a preview of DIRAC\u2019s mission.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLSST could completely transform our knowledge of our universe,\u201d he&nbsp;said.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Andrew Connolly: What's the next window into our universe?\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cI9vSC1eQ18?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>DIRAC stands for \u201cdata intensive research in astrophysics and cosmology,\u201d but the acronym also pays tribute to 20th-century theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, a Nobel-winning pioneer of quantum mechanics who predicted the discovery of antimatter.<\/p>\n<p>The institute\u2019s primary focus will be to&nbsp;create digital tools for storing and analyzing the huge amounts of data that the Palomar survey, the LSST and other next-generation sky surveys are expected to generate.<\/p>\n<p>LSST alone is designed to record 15 trillion bytes of raw data every night, and survey the entire sky every three days. The telescope is optimized to detect minute changes in the night sky for worldwide follow-up, and the processing system will be built to send out alerts about interesting transient events within 60 seconds of completing the image comparisons.<\/p>\n<p>Connolly told GeekWire that the LSST as well as the Zwicky Transient Facility would be looking for \u201canything that goes bump in the night,\u201d astronomically speaking. As challenging as it will be to analyze all that data in near-real-time, Connolly thinks there will be even bigger challenges ahead.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we really think is going to be the limitation for the science is what the community can do with it&nbsp;\u2013 extracting the knowledge from years\u2019 worth of data,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>The $473 million LSST project is being funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and private contributors including Simonyi and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn the first week, we will see more data from this telescope than all the telescopes in humanity up to that point,\u201d Simonyi said nearly a decade ago.<\/p>\n<p>DIRAC is getting ready for the flood. \u201cWe just completed our first round of hiring,\u201d Connolly said. Three to four postdoctoral researchers are due to join the institute this summer, and more researchers are expected to come on board in the months ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Artwork shows the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope scanning the night sky in Chile. (LSST Illustration) A new data analysis center for what\u2019s expected to be torrents of astronomical imagery is taking shape at the University of Washington. Thanks to contributions&nbsp;from software billionaire Charles Simonyi and other donors, researchers at the Astronomy Department\u2019s DIRAC Institute are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1661,4366,4367,4368],"class_list":["post-18930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-astronomy","tag-dirac-institute","tag-lsst","tag-university-of-washington"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18930"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}