So said Prof. Shrinivas Kulkarni from the Department of Astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology, and one of the winners of the Dan David Prize ● According to him, "The human in the loop becomes monotonous - if a machine can do it better, I think everyone will be happy"
"Astronomy is the second science to officially become the science of Big Data, after biology," said Prof. Shrinivas Kulkarni, from the Department of Astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in an interview with the science website and the website for people and computers.
Kulkarni won the Dan David Award for being a key figure in astronomical observations in the time domain and across the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. He initiated and managed the PTF project, a large celestial survey in search of transient and variable astronomical sources.
The reasons for the award committee state that "His research has enriched human knowledge about the changing sky, including the discovery and characterization of thousands of stellar explosions - supernovae and the like. Many of the events that were discovered were observed in detail and understood more than ever before, with some of them contributing to the definition of completely new types of explosions that had not been observed before."
The robot has no prejudices
According to Cuclarney, visiting the telescope will soon become a thing of the past. "The best way to do astronomy is to get the astronomers out of the dome," he says.
"The human in the loop becomes monotonous, if a machine can do it better, I think everyone will be happy. The machines are good for studying the sky, because they have no preconceptions about what they will find." Astronomers, says Kulkarni, "simply don't have the imagination to know what to look for."
"In the last 30 years, astronomy has developed rapidly. Each new generation of devices produces 100 times more data per second than the previous one. And not only that - each experiment is designed to answer a specific question, but during the observations so much data is generated that only some of it is used. Therefore, there is a great opportunity for those who want to analyze this data."
"My group is currently building a machine that will produce much more data - the Zwiki Transient Facility at Mount Plumer in California. She will photograph the entire sky every three nights and repeat this over and over again."
In a second step, Kulkarni said, “it will observe one part of the sky intensively and alert us to supernova events within hours, so that we can make additional observations from other telescopes to study that supernova. In other words, not only do our devices collect a lot of data, they also analyze it and respond quickly."
like a miracle
Another reason for the ability to respond quickly, Kulkarni said, "is that there are a lot more expectations today than there were ten years ago. For example, if you discover something in California, and the sun is about to rise, you can watch it from Hawaii."
"Then a problem arises because there are no large observatories between Hawaii and Spain, but observatories are starting to be built in China and India. And there are many small observatories like the one in the Negev (Mitzpe Ramon AB) and in the Atlantic Ocean there are nice facilities in the Canary Islands. There are also large observatories in the southern hemisphere - in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Chile (Las Palms) and of course there are telescopes in space that are less affected by the day and night cycle."
"Today it is not uncommon to find data from five or six telescopes in one scientific paper," said Kulkarni. "It's like a miracle, you discover something and send signals to the spacecraft and it points its telescopes at the object. Someone else in New Mexico is relaying real-time results from radio telescopes to you - it's a global effort. I find it very interesting."
Is the alternative between large telescopes and algorithms that dig into existing data to find natural phenomena that escaped the hands of the original observers?
"Large telescopes cost a lot of money, and now even a lot of money, but they will continue to be built, due to a variety of problems that require the collection of photons from blind objects. There are no miracles here, you just need to build a bigger telescope. But there is more than one way to do astronomy. Another option is to build dedicated devices for the phenomenon that you want to check."
"All these devices produce data, which is of course available to any scientist who wants to find discoveries in them, far beyond the specific research for which they were established."
What kind of development should the field of computer science go through to help astronomy, as they are used for gene scanning, for example? Is it possible to adopt developments from the field of bioinformatics to the field of astronomy?
"The field of scanning the human genome has indeed progressed. The trend is to scan not only the genes of a few people, but the genes of everyone."
"Already today, it costs about 5,000 dollars to sequence a person's genome, and the trend is to drop below 1,000 dollars, an amount where many in the developed world will be able to afford it in order to know which genetic diseases they carry. It has medicinal value. These scans produce mountains of data."
According to Kulkarni, "Already today, the volume of data produced by astronomical instruments is the largest volume of data, with YouTube in second place, the data produced by gene scanning devices in third place, and Twitter in fourth place."
Much richer than we imagined
"One of the studies showed that in about a decade, the data generated as a result of gene scans will surpass the volume of data on YouTube and Twitter, and even the particle accelerator at CERN, whose scientists have been dealing with mountains of information for years, will only leave a small mark on the volume of data."
The good news, Kulkarni said, "is that astronomy produces a lot of data. The bad news is that science has to be exhausted from all this data. This gives an opportunity to young researchers to look for new methods to access this data. It's a different world for them than the one I grew up in."
"At the University of Washington, Berkeley and New York University, there are astronomy departments that specialize in computer science. Someone even invented a name for it - Astro Informatics," he said.
In conclusion, Prof. Kulkarni said that "the sky is much richer than we imagined, and one should always approach it with a certain sense of openness."
The article was first published on the People and Computers website
