Dr. Monika Soraisam, NSF’s NOIRLab
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Abstract: With several large-scale sky surveys ongoing and recently completed, the era of Big Data has dawned on optical time-domain astronomy. Abundant archival data provide an opportunity to perform systematic studies of stellar variability in nearby galaxies, and thereby yield constraints on the effect of environmental factors, such as metallicity. I will present results from mining the data from the Palomar Transient Factory survey for photometric variability of luminous stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. On the other hand, the enormous volume and rate of data bring their own challenges for real-time applications. I will highlight recent progress in the development of infrastructure and analysis tools to tackle those challenges, with a focus on broker systems (e.g., ANTARES), which allow timely discovery and characterization of interesting short-lived astrophysical events by automatically triaging the overwhelming time-domain alert-data. As part of the broker, an efficient and effective algorithm for selecting rare and novel events is crucial in the big-data era. I will briefly describe such an algorithm I have designed in preparation for VRO/LSST alerts.
Monika’s host will be Tom Matheson. If you would like to meet with Monika, please email Tom at matheson@noao.edu.
Via Zoom at: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/933629524