Astronomy has entered the Era of Surveys. Specially designed telescopes are taking images of the whole sky in many wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. The next generation systems are now exploring the time domain, collecting temporal data over a wide range of timescales from 20 seconds to tens of years. Soon we will have billions of time series of celestial objects. In another domain we are measuring spectra over every pixel of a galaxy. Data science is increasingly at the forefront of the analyses. Using mathematical techniques from data science like compressive sensing it is possible to extract a lot more information than previously thought. The talk will briefly show a few such possibilities related to data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and discuss the future.

Alex Szalay, Johns Hopkins Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science