The Astronomical Event Search Engine

eldavojohn writes "Google has signed on with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project that will construct a powerful telescope in Chile by 2013. Google's part will be to 'develop a search engine that can process, organize, and analyze the voluminous amounts of data coming from the instrument's data streams in real time. The engine will create "movie-like windows" for scientists to view significant space events.' Google's been successful on turning its search technology on several different media and realms. Will they be successful with helping scientists tag and catalog events in our universe?" The telescope will generate 30 TB of data a night, for 10 years, from a 3-gigapixel CCD array.

Comments

Re:Lots of data, but not as much as the LHC

[mcelrath]

The LHC will produce more data, but we also don't care about most of it. The vast majority of it is junk. The "interesting" physics (particles like W and Z bosons, top quarks, higgs, etc) are about 10^-9 of the events. It is a huge needle in a haystack problem and we throw out most data. We have many experts and professors who design "triggers" which, based on a subset of information that can be delivered to them in a reasonable time, decide whether a given proton-proton collison contains new physics. Many theorists these days are making dents in walls with their heads trying to think of ways these triggers might be missing important information, so that we can suggest changes before it's too late. This is a lot of dedicated silicon, FPGA's, VME crates, etc. Slashdotters should drool. Anyway, we throw out the vast majority of information.

By comparison, LSST is trying to store everything. Scroll up for an interesting comment about calibrating ambient brightness and seeing. I can't answer which will deliver more information, but both are incredibly interesting challenges.

Data challenges abound. We have designed the LHC Grid to distribute this information. There will be several data warehouses located around the world at national labs and universities. Even after the triggers decide what is "interesting", more sophisticated algorithms, with access to all the data in a single proton-proton collision are applied. Then, humans are applied to the data and we will try to dig out new signals from this.

In all this we expect to find (among other things) the origin of mass and Dark Matter, and we're working hard to prepare for the onslaught of data. :)

-- Bob