Within five years it may be possible for astronomers to discover new stars, planets and other spatial phenomenon without having to even look through a telescope. This comes as a result of a recent $10 million project launched by the National Science Foundation to develop a National Virtual Observatory.
The project, being jointly undertaken by 17 institutions, is led by astronomer Alexander Szalay of The Johns Hopkins University and Paul C. Messina, the director of the California Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Computing Research.
The National Virtual Observatory will amalgamate the data from numerous astronomical databases into a single usable interface. While initially the NVO will only contain several dozen major databases, the aim is to eventually incorporate hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of smaller specialized databases.
Currently, there are approximately 100 terabytes of archived data. That's roughly 150,000 compact discs or 100 million novels. By 2008 it is believed that the volume of available data will be about 10 pentabytes (1 pentabyte = 1,000 terabytes), 100 times what it is currently.
The data base is expected to increase dramatically with the development of new research facilities recording in wavelengths from radio to x-ray ranges, which are coupled with advances in instrument techniques.
"If we do not develop ways to distill information and insights from these floods of data, we will end up like shipwrecked sailors on a desert island, surrounded by an ocean of salt water and unable to slake our thirst," Messina said.
At present, it is possible to access the archives of at least 10 observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Nonetheless, each database functions in a different fashion.
"You have to go in, one by one, and learn about its quirks. You have to know a lot. It's quite a lot of work," Szalay said. The NVO will eliminate that.
"The same work could be done now, but it might take a scientist 10 years to reach a certain result," said Eileen Friel, head of the astronomy division of the National Science Foundation. Utilizing the NVO, "you could reach that same result in an hour."
Today, an astronomer might have to wait months, or even years to get time on a telescope to make the necessary observations. The NVO, however, will allow that astronomer to gain access to stars online. More specifically, the astronomer can check if someone else has performed the necessary observations for other purposes.
"If I'm lucky, I can do the project right away, in a matter of weeks, because I still have to do some of my own analysis," according to Szalay. Moreover, the NVO will allow astronomers to access more diverse data on what they are studying that they might have had normally.
The goals of the project are not limited to the creation of a single accessible database.
Eventually, users of the NVO will be able to harness the collective computing power available in order to run complex models and computations, which could not have been done previously. In this fashion, the NVO will be using a project started two years ago by Szalay as a foundation.
"Nobody was thinking about the big picture, because everyone was so overwhelmed with solving their own technological problems," Szalay said.
Working with the NVO, "you simply submit a problem to your computer, and if your computer sees that it is simply too big a computational problem for it, it will go out and ask the local networks which ones have the resources to run this program - if the system identified cannot handle it, it will incorporate the computer systems at other research nodes," Szalay said. "Ultimately, this will really change the way astronomy is done, so people can spend much more time on actually making new discoveries rather than taking up mental energy over a lot of routine work."
A international conference will be held at the California Institute of Technology in mid June, with the gold of exploring the possibilities for new astronomy with large digital sky surveys and archives.
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