Computer Science Tools Flood Astronomers With Data

purkinje writes "Astronomy is getting a major data-gathering boost from computer science, as new tools like real-time telescopic observations and digital sky surveys provide astronomers with an unprecedented amount of information — the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for instance, generates 30 terabytes of data each night. Using informatics and other data-crunching approaches, astronomers — with the help of computer science — may be able to get at some of the biggest, as-yet-unanswerable cosmological questions."

True in all fields

[eparker05]

Many sciences are experiencing this trend. A branch of biochemistry known as metabolomics is a growing field right now (in which I happen to be participating). Using tools like liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry we can get hundreds of megabytes of data per hour. Even worse is the fact that a large percentage of that data is explicitly relevant to a metabolomic profile. The only practical way of analyzing all of this information is through computational analysis, either through statistical techniques used to condense and compare the data, or though searches on painstakingly generated metabolomic libraries.

That is just my corner of the world, but I imagine that many of the low hanging fruits of scientific endeavor have already been picked, going forward, I believe that the largest innovations will come from the people willing to tackle data sets that a generation ago would be seen as insurmountable.

Re:If you'd like to help with all that data...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Annnnd... we have a winner. GalaxyZoo uses tens of thousands of underutilized, superfluous, non-specialized 'carbon units' for pattern recognition, which they're really really really good at, that is, 800mS after looking at an image -> elliptical, spiral, irregular... "Hmmm, hey, that's funny... wait... WTF --- let's post this to the forum, where hundreds of other random carbon units will weigh it, and a For Really Astronomer(TM) will be checking it out inside 24 hours if it creates enough buzz..." see Hanny's Voorwerp [wikipedia.org] for the quintessential example.

Software that could 'be surprised' would be nice, but it's a long, long way off.