How Big Data Is Changing Astronomy

How Big Data Is Changing Astronomy

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If we could express all of that data as a number of bits, our fundamental unit of information, that number would be, well, astronomical. But that’s not all: in the next year that number is going to double, and the year after that it will double again, and so on and so on.

There are two reasons that astronomy is experiencing this accelerating explosion of data. First, we are getting very good at building telescopes that can image enormous portions of the sky. Second, the sensitivity of our detectors is subject to the exponential force of Moore’s Law. That means that these enormous images are increasingly dense with pixels, and they’re growing fast – the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled to become operational in 2015, has a three-billion-pixel digital camera. So far, our data storage capabilities have kept pace with the massive output of these electronic stargazers. The real struggle has been figuring out how to search and synthesize that output.