Visualization in Astrophysics: Developing New Methods, Discovering Our Universe, and Educating the Earth

Abstract

We present a state-of-the-art report on visualization in astrophysics. We survey representative papers from both astrophysics and visualization and provide a taxonomy of existing approaches based on data analysis tasks. The approaches are classified based on five categories: data wrangling, data exploration, feature identification, object reconstruction, as well as education and outreach. Our unique contribution is to combine the diverse viewpoints from both astronomers and visualization experts to identify challenges and opportunities for visualization in astrophysics. The main goal is to provide a reference point to bring modern data analysis and visualization techniques to the rich datasets in astrophysics.

References in corpus (35)

• Simulating the joint evolution of quasars, galaxies and their large-scale distribution
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
• Simulating Galaxy Formation with the IllustrisTNG Model
• The Aquarius Project: the subhalos of galactic halos
• Enzo: An Adaptive Mesh Refinement Code for Astrophysics
• The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure I: Theory and implementation
• Data Mining and Machine Learning in Astronomy
• Tracing the cosmic web
• Galacticus: A Semi-Analytic Model of Galaxy Formation
• Star-galaxy Classification Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
• Structure Finding in Cosmological Simulations: The State of Affairs
• Shape: A 3D Modeling Tool for Astrophysics
• Skeleton as a probe of the cosmic web: the 2D case
• Felix: A Topology based Framework for Visual Exploration of Cosmic Filaments
• Finding cosmic voids and filament loops using topological data analysis
• Classifying the Large Scale Structure of the Universe with Deep Neural Networks
• Deep Learning at Scale for the Construction of Galaxy Catalogs in the Dark Energy Survey
• Detecting outliers and learning complex structures with large spectroscopic surveys - a case study with APOGEE stars
• The Application of the Montage Image Mosaic Engine To The Visualization Of Astronomical Images
• A Novel Approach to Visualizing Dark Matter Simulations
• The Cosmic V-Web
• Augmented Reality in Astrophysics
• Advanced Data Visualization in Astrophysics: the X3D Pathway
• Future Directions in Astronomy Visualisation
• Interactive 3D Visualization for Theoretical Virtual Observatories
• Houdini for Astrophysical Visualization
• Linking the X3D pathway to integral field spectrographs: YSNR 1E0102.2-7219 in the SMC as a case study
• Cosmography and Data Visualization
• Large-scale comparative visualisation of sets of multidimensional data
• The Fabric of the Universe: Exploring the cosmic web in 3D prints and woven textiles
• Cinematic Visualization of Multiresolution Data: Ytini for Adaptive Mesh Refinement in Houdini
• Voxel datacubes for 3D visualization in Blender
• IDEAS: Immersive Dome Experiences for Accelerating Science
• Visualising three-dimensional volumetric data with an arbitrary coordinate system
• The CASA software for radio astronomy: status update from ADASS 2019