Related papers: The Digital Sky Project: Prototyping Virtual Obser…
An array of large observational programs using ground-based and space-borne telescopes is planned in the next decade. The forthcoming wide-field sky surveys are expected to deliver a sheer volume of data exceeding an exabyte. Processing the…
Astronomy and astrophysics are witnessing dramatic increases in data volume as detectors, telescopes and computers become ever more powerful. During the last decade, sky surveys across the electromagnetic spectrum have collected hundreds of…
Recent all-sky and large-area astronomical surveys and their catalogued data over the whole range of electromagnetic spectrum are reviewed, from Gamma-ray to radio, such as Fermi-GLAST and INTEGRAL in Gamma-ray, ROSAT, XMM and Chandra in…
Looking ahead to the next decade and imagining the landscape of astronomy in 2020, it is clear that astronomical surveys, large and small, plus extensive follow-up projects, will be a great engine of progress in our profession. Surveys have…
Astronomy has always been at the forefront of information technology, moving from the era of photographic plates, to digital snapshots and now to digital movies of the sky. This has brought about a data explosion with multi- terabyte…
The nature of scientific and technological data collection is evolving rapidly: data volumes and rates grow exponentially, with increasing complexity and information content, and there has been a transition from static data sets to data…
Scientists in all domains face a data avalanche - both from better instruments and from improved simulations. We believe that computer science tools and computer scientists are in a position to help all the sciences by building tools and…
The advent of deep, wide, accurate, digital photometric surveys exemplified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has had a profound impact on studies of the Milky Way. In the past decade, we have transitioned from a scarcity to an…
Variability in the sky has been known for centuries, even millennia, but our knowledge of it is very incomplete even at the bright end. Current technology makes it possible to built small, robotic optical instruments, to record images and…
Humanity has wondered whether we are alone for millennia. The discovery of life elsewhere in the Universe, particularly intelligent life, would have profound effects, comparable to those of recognizing that the Earth is not the center of…
Modern astronomy increasingly relies upon systematic surveys, whose dedicated telescopes continuously observe the sky across varied wavelength ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum; some surveys also observe non-electromagnetic…
We provide a brief, and inevitably incomplete overview of the use of Machine Learning (ML) and other AI methods in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. Astronomy entered the big data era with the first digital sky surveys in the early…
The beginning of the 21st century marked the "modern era of galaxy surveys" in astronomy. Rapid innovation in observing technology, combined with the base built by galaxy catalogs and atlases dating back centuries, sparked an explosion of…
The next decade will feature a growing number of massive ground-based photometric, spectroscopic, and time-domain surveys, including those produced by DECam, DESI, and LSST. The NOAO Data Lab was launched in 2017 to enable efficient…
We live in a universe filled with galaxies with an amazing variety of sizes and shapes. One of the biggest challenges for astronomers working in this field is to understand how all these types relate to each other in the background of an…
It is argued that the astronomy of the twenty-first century will be dominated by computer-based manipulation of huge homogeneous surveys of various types of astronomical objects. Furthermore combination of all observations with large…
Astrophysical observations of the cosmos allow us to probe extreme physics and answer foundational questions on our universe. Modern astronomy is increasingly operating under a holistic approach, probing the same question with multiple…
Observational astronomy has shown significant growth over the last decade and has made important contributions to cosmology. A major paradigm shift in cosmology was brought about by observations of Type Ia supernovae. The notion that the…
Scientists across all disciplines increasingly rely on machine learning algorithms to analyse and sort datasets of ever increasing volume and complexity. Although trends and outliers are easily extracted, careful and close inspection will…
Powerful new observational facilities will come online over the next decade, enabling a number of discovery opportunities in the "Cosmic Frontier", which targets understanding of the physics of the early universe, dark matter and dark…