University of Wisconsin, Madison | 2015 Mar 24
It’s almost a rite of passage in physics and astronomy. Scientists spend years scrounging up money to build a fantastic new instrument. Then, when the long-awaited device finally approaches completion, the panic begins: How will they handle the torrent of data?
That’s the situation now, at least, with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a radio telescope planned for Africa and Australia that will have an unprecedented ability to deliver data — lots of data points, with lots of details — on the location and properties of stars, galaxies and giant clouds of hydrogen gas.
In a study published in The Astronomical Journal, a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has developed a new, faster approach to analyzing all that data. ...
With automated data processing, “suddenly we are not time-limited,” Lindner says. “Let’s take the whole survey from SKA. Even if each pixel is not quite as precise, maybe, as a human calculation, we can do a thousand or a million times more pixels, and so that averages out in our favor.”
Autonomous Gaussian Decomposition - Robert R. Lindner et al
- Astronomical Journal 149(4) 138 (2015 April) DOI: 10.1088/0004-6256/149/4/138
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1409.2840 > 09 Sep 2014