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Most major discoveries in astronomy are unplanned, and result from surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. For example, of the 10 greatest discoveries…
Identifying and predicting the factors that contribute to the success of interdisciplinary research is crucial for advancing scientific discovery. However, there is a lack of methods to quantify the integration of new ideas and…
In the era of big data astronomy, next generation telescopes and large sky surveys produce data sets at the TB or even PB level. Due to their large data volumes, these astronomical data sets are extremely difficult to transfer and analyze…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…
Modern astronomical surveys such as the Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) promise an unprecedented wealth of discoveries, delivered in the form of ~10 million alerts of time-variable events per night. Astronomers are faced with the daunting…
Large scientific institutions, such as the Space Telescope Science Institute, track the usage of their facilities to understand the needs of the research community. Astrophysicists incorporate facility usage data into their scientific…
Planetary spatial data returned by spacecraft, including images and higher-order products such as mosaics, controlled basemaps, and digital elevation models (DEMs), are of critical importance to NASA, its commercial partners and other space…
For more than a decade the Joint Astronomy Centre has been developing software tools to simplify observing and make it possible to use the telescopes in many different operational modes. In order to support remote operations the data…
We review the relatively new, internet-enabled, and rapidly-evolving field of citizen science, focusing on research projects in stellar, extragalactic and solar system astronomy that have benefited from the participation of members of the…
Cosmology has come a long way from being based on a small number of observations to being a data-driven precision science. We discuss the questions "What is observable?", "What in the Universe is knowable?" and "What are the fundamental…
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airborne astronomical observatory comprised of a 2.5-meter telescope mounted in the aft section of a Boeing 747SP aircraft. During routine operations, several instruments…
Science advances not only through the accumulation of facts but also through the evolution of tools. Crucially, tools are rarely used in isolation. They form tool portfolios, combinations shaped by a discipline's workflows and analytical…
Astronomical datasets are growing in size and diversity, posing severe technical problems. At the same time scientific goals increasingly require the analysis of very large amounts of data, and data from multiple archives. The Virtual…
Historically, astronomy has prioritized visuals to present information, with scientists and communicators overlooking the critical need to communicate astrophysics with blind or low-vision audiences and provide novel channels for sighted…
Interactive visualization of astronomical catalogs requires novel techniques due to the huge volumes and complex structure of the data produced by existing and upcoming astronomical surveys. The creation as well as the disclosure of the…
Some of the most exciting and promising areas of Astronomy research today are found at the boundaries of the discipline: the search for Exoplanets and Multi-Messenger Astronomy. In order to achieve breakthroughs in these research fields…
Astronomical data reduction is usually done with processing pipelines that consist of a series of individual processing steps that can be executed stand-alone. These processing steps are then strung together into workflows and fed with data…
The goal of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is ``to map in detail one-quarter of the entire sky, determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects''. The survey will be performed by taking…
Scientific data governance should prioritize maximizing the utility of data throughout the research lifecycle. Research software systems that enable analysis reproducibility inform data governance policies and assist administrators in…
The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory was a software infrastructure and development project designed both to begin the establishment of an operational Virtual Observatory (VO) and to provide the U.S. coordination with the international…