Related papers: The National Virtual Observatory
The days of the lone astronomer with his optical telescope and photographic plates are long gone: Astronomy in 2025 will not only be multi-wavelength, but multi-messenger, and dominated by huge data sets and matching data rates. Catalogues…
Environmental science is often fragmented: data is collected using mismatched formats and conventions, and models are misaligned and run in isolation. Cloud computing offers a lot of potential in the way of resolving such issues by…
The World Space Observatory Project is a new space mission concept, grown out the needs of the Astronomical community to have access to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum where all known physics can be studied on all possible time…
Throughout the Universe many powerful events are driven by strong gravitational effects that require general relativity to fully describe them. These include compact binary mergers, black hole accretion and stellar collapse, where…
Traditional science searched for new objects and phenomena that led to discoveries. Tomorrow's science will combine together the large pool of information in scientific archives and make discoveries. Scienthists are currently keen to…
Survey telescopes such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Square Kilometre Array will discover billions of static and dynamic astronomical sources. Properly mined, these enormous datasets will likely be wellsprings of rare or unknown…
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…
This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us…
The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO; http://www.us-vao.org/) has been in operation since May 2010. Its goal is to enable new science through efficient integration of distributed multi-wavelength data. This paper describes the…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is a global ecosystem of interoperating services that connect worldwide data archives. The VO is implemented in all major astronomy archives through common interfaces developed by the 22 members of the…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
As observers of the universe we are quantum physical systems within it. If the universe is very large in space and/or time, the probability becomes significant that the data on which we base predictions is replicated at other locations in…
Over the last decade, the term spatial computing has grown to have two different, though not entirely unrelated, definitions. The first definition of spatial computing stems from industry, where it refers primarily to new kinds of…
Recent X-ray observations have had a major impact on topics ranging from protostars to cosmology. They have also drawn attention to important and general physical processes that currently limit our understanding of thermal and nonthermal…
Astrophysics lies at the crossroads of big datasets (such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Gaia), open source software to visualize and interpret high dimensional datasets (such as Glue, WorldWide Telescope, and OpenSpace), and…
At the frontier of most areas in science, computer simulations play a central role. The traditional division of natural science into experimental and theoretical investigations is now completely outdated. Instead, theory, simulation, and…
Stellar astronomy, fueled by massive capital investments, advances in numerical modeling and theory, is resurgent and arguably is on the verge of a magnificent renaissance. Powerful time domain optical surveys, both on ground and in space,…
With neutrino astronomy just beginning to burgeon, and the prospects of detecting the cosmic neutrino background closer than ever, we live in an era with the unique opportunity not only to investigate the universe with this novel probe, but…
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…