Astrophysical Sciences and Technology Colloquium: Why Data is Eating the Universe

Astrophysical Sciences and Technology Colloquium
Why Data is Eating the Universe: Getting ready for LSST and the Age of Massive Sky Surveys

Dr. Mario Jurić
Director of UW's Institute for Data-intensive Research in Astronomy and Cosmology (DiRAC)
University of Washington

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Abstract:
Over the past decade, astronomy has morphed into an extremely data-rich field, with numerous telescope projects dedicated to scanning the sky every night in order to find and measure the properties of the tens of billions of visible objects in the sky. One of these --the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST; http://lsst.org) --will be the most comprehensive optical astronomy project ever undertaken. Starting in 2024, the LSST will take panoramic images of the entire visible sky twice each week for 10 years, building up the deepest, widest, image of the Universe. The resulting hundreds of petabytes of imaging data for close to 40 billion objects can enable scientific investigations ranging from the properties of near-Earth asteroids to characterizations of dark matter and dark energy. Yet at the same time, the sheer data volume and richness make it a difficult dataset to analyze using classical data analysis tools and techniques. At UW’s DiRAC Institute, we’re about to embark on a 5-yr LINCC Frameworks program to develop analysis system on industry-standard solutions, and enable astronomers to scalably work with petabytes of data stored both in cloud and on traditional HPC resources. In this talk, Dr. Jurić will overview the upcoming LSST datasets, the LINCC program, and opportunities for early LSST science. He will describe the challenges of astronomical data analysis at LSST-scale, how we adapted tools like Spark 2 to allow exploratory analysis of 2Bn-object ZTF time-series dataset, and some hopes, visions, and prototypes for a (cloud-based) future. Most importantly, he hopes to give you a sense of what 2024 --when the LSST comes online --will feel like, and how to get ready to take advantage of LSST yourself.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Mario Jurić is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington and the Director of UW's Institute for Data-intensive Research in Astronomy and Cosmology (DiRAC). Mario's interests are in astronomical survey driven science and technology. He leads Rubin Observatory's Solar System pipelines team and DiRAC's Solar System and Data Engineering groups. Most recently he's been working on mapping the Solar System's asteroid and TNO populations, from Near-Earth Objects for planetary defense to deep KBO and Planet 9 searches in the outer Solar System.

Intended Audience:
All are welcome. Those with interest in the topic.

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