Sky Surveys

Abstract

Sky surveys represent a fundamental data basis for astronomy. We use them to map in a systematic way the universe and its constituents, and to discover new types of objects or phenomena. We review the subject, with an emphasis on the wide-field imaging surveys, placing them in a broader scientific and historical context. Surveys are the largest data generators in astronomy, propelled by the advances in information and computation technology, and have transformed the ways in which astronomy is done. We describe the variety and the general properties of surveys, the ways in which they may be quantified and compared, and offer some figures of merit that can be used to compare their scientific discovery potential. Surveys enable a very wide range of science; that is perhaps their key unifying characteristic. As new domains of the observable parameter space open up thanks to the advances in technology, surveys are often the initial step in their exploration. Science can be done with the survey data alone or a combination of different surveys, or with a targeted follow-up of potentially interesting selected sources. Surveys can be used to generate large, statistical samples of objects that can be studied as populations, or as tracers of larger structures. They can be also used to discover or generate samples of rare or unusual objects, and may lead to discoveries of some previously unknown types. We discuss a general framework of parameter spaces that can be used for an assessment and comparison of different surveys, and the strategies for their scientific exploration. As we move into the Petascale regime, an effective processing and scientific exploitation of such large data sets and data streams poses many challenges, some of which may be addressed in the framework of Virtual Observatory and Astroinformatics, with a broader application of data mining and knowledge discovery technologies.

An invited chapter, to appear in Astronomical Techniques, Software, and Data (ed. H. Bond), Vol.2 of Planets, Stars, and Stellar Systems (ser. ed. T. Oswalt), Springer Verlag, in press (2012). 62 pages, incl. 2 tables and 3 figures

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• Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• Immersive and Collaborative Data Visualization Using Virtual Reality Platforms
• Gravitational Lenses as High-Resolution Telescopes
• Real-Time Data Mining of Massive Data Streams from Synoptic Sky Surveys
• Automatic detection of peculiar galaxy pairs in Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• A catalog of broad morphology of Pan-STARRS galaxies based on deep learning
• Probing delayed-end reionization histories with the 21cm-LAE cross-power spectrum
• BANYAN. X. Discovery of a wide, low-gravity L-type companion to a fast-rotating M3 dwarf
• New magnetic chemically peculiar stars and candidates in the ATLAS First Catalog of Variable Stars
• Deep Co-Added Sky from Catalina Sky Survey Images
• Automated Real-Time Classification and Decision Making in Massive Data Streams from Synoptic Sky Surveys
• Processing GOTO data with the Rubin Observatory LSST Science Pipelines I : Production of coadded frames
• An Information Theory Approach on Deciding Spectroscopic Follow Ups
• Relating Peak Optical Luminosity and Orbital Period of Stellar-Mass Black Holes in X-ray Binaries