In a move of inter-galactic proportions, the planet’s leading search engine has announced a partnership with the University of Washington, among others in academia, to create the world’s largest database — a moving picture of the entire universe.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, is planned to begin operation in 2013 on a mountaintop in Chile, The telescope will take moving digital images — rather than the typical static snapshots — of all space, the entire visible sky. “It will be the greatest movie of all time,” said UW astronomer Craig Hogan, one of the leading scientists working on the project. “It will transform how we do science.”
The Google announcement was timed to precede the Seattle conference frequently dubbed the “Super Bowl of Astronomy,” the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Some 2,500 professional stargazers gathered at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center for four days starting yesterday to discuss such exotica as supernovae, quasars, astrobiology and the mysteries of dark matter and gravitational waves.
Headquartered in Tucson, the LSST project was launched in 2003 by the UW, the University of Arizona, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and a private foundation called Research Corp.
More than 30,000 gigabytes worth of images will be generated every evening. This daily tsunami of data will have to be analyzed constantly as it accumulates over time, she said, and then efficiently managed to make it publicly accessible.
“Right now, we don’t really have any way of finding them early enough, before it’s obvious,” said Suzanne Hawley, chairwoman of the UW astronomy department. Because the LSST collects images of moving objects, Hawley said, it could be useful for identifying much earlier any asteroid on a collision course with our planet.
The UW’s interest in the LSST project, she noted, is based on its previous work in the 1980s that led to a similar project known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — another collaborative effort still under way collecting a photographic survey of hundreds of millions of stars, galaxies and other celestial objects.
“We were also one of the founding members of that,” said Hawley, who currently serves as director of the Sloan consortium that operates its telescope from Apache Point, N.M.
Certainly, this year’s most widely recognized local contributor to the advancement of astronomy was the UW’s Donald Brownlee, principal investigator for NASA’s Stardust mission that captured some comet dust and brought it back to Earth for analysis.
Brownlee said he expects to keep a low profile at this year’s astronomy meeting in Seattle, adding that the organization only lets members give a “big talk every 10 years” and he had his shot last year (speaking about Stardust, of course).
RSS
