Invited talk (I1.1) Joseph Mazzarella (IPAC, Caltech)
Theme: Data discovery across heterogeneous datasets
Science Discovery with Diverse Multi-wavelength Datasets Fused in NED
Data from space-based observatories, large sky surveys, and the astrophysics literature are growing at an unprecedented rate. The ongoing expansion in volume, velocity and variety of astronomical data is creating exciting opportunities for making ground-breaking discoveries from interconnected archives and databases. I will discuss how recent advances in joining data across the spectrum from NASA's GALEX, 2MASS and ALLWISE sky surveys with over 114,000 smaller catalogs and journal articles, combined with new capabilities of the user interface, are helping astronomers make new discoveries directly from information fused in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). Some recent scientific results that were facilitated by NED will be reviewed, including the discovery and characterization of super spiral galaxies, rapid identification of the electromagnetic counterpart to the first gravitational wave event detected from a pair of merging neutron stars, and analysis of variations of the pitch angles of spiral arms to test density wave theory. I will close with a discussion of major challenges and limitations in joining heterogeneous datasets, and the increasing need to apply novel visualization and astroinformatics techniques to make big data sets better by facilitating multi-wavelength science in the 2020s. NED is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA.
