Johns Hopkins to Develop $9.5M Virtual Telescope as Kepler Finds New Planets

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) led by professor of astronomy Alexander Szalay has received a $9.5 million grant to create a virtual telescope to sift through large-scale data sets and help astronomers make discoveries quicker. The new project, called the Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (or DIBBs), aims at creating a framework in which massive amounts of astronomy data can be more efficiently viewed and analyzed.

According to a statement from JHU, the funding comes as part of a collaborative agreement between JHU and the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure division, and will include an array of other partners, including the Virtual Astronomy Observatory, the GalaxyZoo project, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

A key partner on the project is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has 3-D mapped an enormous amount of space, including 1.8 million galaxies and more than 320,000 quasars. “The SDSS project is the astronomy version of the Human Genome Project,” Szalay says in a statement.

As a collaborator of the SDSS project, JHU built the SkyServer database, which has become a popular public database enabling astronomers to access some of the data coming out of the SDSS project. However, due to the size of the datasets, the researchers are finding that their usefulness is often out of reach. “Open data is not necessarily accessible,” Szalay says. “We have to overcome several important challenges before a data set that is public is really usable and useful.”

“How to ask a question of such data sets is a science in itself,” Szalay says. “There’s lots of data, so it’s a little like drinking from a fire hose. It’s not just about computing; we’re trying to build a new kind of scientific instrument—a virtual telescope and microscope of data—one that can observe data and find and extract knowledge to help you see the patterns.”

Creating some form of analytical framework to make sense of all of this data is a big job that the NSF estimates will take at least five years. To date, the NSF has awarded $7.6 million of the funding for the project with the following $1.9 coming after successful 18- and 36-month reviews.

The funding announcement comes at a very exciting time for astronomy buffs as fresh news from NASA’s Kepler Space Observatory reveals that the universe is teeming with Earth-like planets. In a press briefing on Monday, NASA’s Kepler scientists revealed that they’ve discovered 833 new candidate planets that are orbiting their sun’s habitable zone (defined as the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of the orbiting planet may be suitable for liquid water).

While this new revelation brings the total of identified potential habitable world candidates to over 3,500, the scientists estimate that there are possibly as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy. According to NASA, most stars in our galaxy have at least one planet orbiting them – a discovery that William Borucki, the Kepler science principal investigator, says heralds the “opening of a new era of astronomy.”

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