Virtual Telescope from Data Mining

Atomic Snarl writes: "The ASTROVIRTEL project is mining a 7 Terabyte archive from NASA, ESA, and others for all things astronomical. One recent discovery is a new Kupier Belt object larger than asteroid Ceres. APOD story here, ESO press release here. They're looking for more research projects, too. Just the thing for all those spare cycles on your G4 Cube... ;-)"

"Historic" findings

[mfarah]

This is way cool. The idea of looking for previous sightings of newly discovered stuff has an enormous potential.

Asteroid 2001 KX76 is even larger than Pluto's moon Charon (diameter 1150 km), adding fuel to the discussions concerning Pluto's status as a "major" or "minor" planet.

I heavily suspect that there are several Pluto-sized objects in the KB waiting to be discovered. This newest finding has changed my mind: I was a stubborn "Pluto is a planet" supporter, now I think it's not.

Computers Take Over Science

[QuantumFTL]

First it was simple math. Then physics. Then chemistry and biology, and now this. While computers have been part of observation and analysis of astronomical objects for decades, the level of autonomy that they are currently being given (and the pure size of the data, terrabytes instead of simply analysing several megabyte images) will lead to a revolution in astronomy. Gone are the days where we are simply content to study the sky one star or nebula at a time, and coming soon are times where computers will sift through massive quantities of information, perhaps generated by large constellations of cheap but high-quality wide-field view telescopes in orbit. Perhaps some day we will even be able to correlate data into a very accurate map of the stars in our galaxy, and the galaxies around us. We will be able to better study the bulk statistics of stars and nebulae, of asteroids and planets and black holes. And because of this we will be able to find very rare phenomena happenning, and study it in detail with much better telescopes operated under human supervision.

These are exciting times, seeing the transition take place, and the raw power being given to the astronomers. There are still thousands of questions to be answered, and it is my hope that projects like this and what they lead to will help to answer and test the answers of many of those questions. And while it will probably be a while until the computers start writing their own scientific papers, heh, they will play an increasing role in astronomy. In fact I wonder if it's possible to do useful astronomy (that is astronomy that signifigantly advances our understanding) now without them?