First Science From A Virtual Observatory

mindpixel writes "I first mentioned Virtual Observatories in my July 2000 Slashdot interview. Now, nearly four years later, Spacetelescope.org is reporting a European team has used the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) to find 30 supermassive black holes that had previously escaped detection behind masking dust clouds. The identification of this large population of long-sought 'hidden' black holes is the first scientific discovery to emerge from a Virtual Observatory. The result suggests that astronomers may have underestimated the number of powerful supermassive black holes by as much as a factor of five."

Comments

Re:GenBank

[CaptainAvatar]

Well, one major difference I can think of is that virtual observatories will include raw data (eg the AUS-VO has 13 years worth of raw observations made by the Australia Telescope Compact Array). So you can look for things in that data that wasn't dreamed of by the astronomers who took it in the first place. For example, those foreground stars may merely be an irritant to someone looking at that background galaxy cluster, but to a stellar dynamicist they might be very interesting.

As I understand it, GenBank is just a catalogue of gene sequences, which is to say, the end results of data analysis. This is equivalent in the astronomy world to a catalogue of galaxies or stars or whatnot (which virtual observatories will also include). Of course you can get new science from such a database, but it's a very different kettle of fish to making available all the raw data that the geneticists used to derive the gene sequences in the first place, which could be even more useful (well, I imagine so, but perhaps it wouldn't be useful at all to other geneticists). So a virtual observatory is not mere hyperbole, IMHO, because it can be used to make what are effectively "new" observations of astronomical objects, as well as datamine previously compiled catalogues (a la GenBank, or in astronomy, NED or SIMBAD).

Erm, well, I'm rambling a bit so I'll shut up now.