{"id":3684,"date":"2015-06-22T11:58:16","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T15:58:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=3684"},"modified":"2018-03-26T14:12:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T18:12:02","slug":"a-table-of-contents-for-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2015\/06\/a-table-of-contents-for-the-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"A Table of Contents for the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WSE_Universe_header_edit\"<\/a>Thanks to some \u201celegant\u201d math, Tam\u00e1s Budav\u00e1ri and his team have created a user-friendly catalog of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, effectively putting all the insights they hold at our fingertips.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"WSE_Universe_1\"<\/a>During its 25 years orbiting 350 miles above Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed the way we view the universe. The so-called \u201clittle telescope that could\u201d helped confirm the existence of dark energy and the age of the universe (13 to 14 billion years). It has also shed new light on many of the other mysteries in astronomy.<\/p>\n

Thanks to a groundbreaking new tool, Hubble\u2019s legacy of enabling that kind of revolutionary science will continue long after the satellite has been decommissioned (predicted by NASA to happen over the next few years).<\/p>\n

Created by Whiting School mathematician Tam\u00e1s Budav\u00e1ri<\/a> and a team of astrophysicists at the Space Telescope Science Institute<\/a>, the new Hubble Source Catalog<\/a> brings together all observations taken by the iconic telescope into one comprehensive database and a convenient Web interface. The result? Data that is easy to access for everyone, from the most experienced researchers to amateur astronomers and high school students.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best way to describe the Hubble Source Catalog might be to say that it\u2019s the \u2018table of contents\u2019 for and the summary of all measurements taken across time by the Hubble,\u201d says Budav\u00e1ri, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. \u201cIt\u2019s all there, at your fingertips.\u201d<\/p>\n\"WSE_Universe_2\"<\/a>\n

 <\/p>\n

The team\u2019s ability to create this exciting new tool was due, in large part, to Budav\u00e1ri\u2019s contribution: what he calls an \u201celegant math trick\u201d that helped cross-reference and align the exposures\u2014all taken on slightly different coordinate systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are the deepest observations of the universe ever taken, but that depth comes at a price: Each exposure has a small field of view with only a few standard stars that would allow us to calibrate the measured directions,\u201d he explained. \u201cI had to find a way to put them on a common frame of reference and figured that three dimensional rotations should do the trick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hubble visited some parts of the sky more than a thousand times, collecting such a large volume of data that the usual trigonometric approaches would be too complex and thus too expensive. Budav\u00e1ri recognized that \u201cthe magic happens in the limit of infinitesimal rotations,\u201d which boil the problem down into a three-by-three linear equation.\u201cAs soon as we ran the algorithm on the data, we knew we hit gold: The sources inseparate visits aligned perfectly with accuracies practically down to subpixel levels, which represent orders of magnitudes of improvements,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

A key practical element of the Hubble Source Catalog is that it runs completely inside the database engine, where the data reside. Finding overlapping observations, cross-referencing sources, and the registration of images are all implemented in the Structured Query Language, which ensured that the small team could achieve its big goal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a great success of data-intensive science, which has been a major thrust of Hopkins\u2019 Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science,\u201d says Budav\u00e1ri, who is a member of IDIES<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For the team, the most exciting part of the project is the science it will enable for years to come. \u201cUsing this tool, scientists can do research in minutes that would literally have taken months and even years previously,\u201d Budav\u00e1ri says. \u201cThis means that researchers can now ask\u2014and answer\u2014questions that they haven\u2019t dared to tackle or even thought of yet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to some \u201celegant\u201d math, Tam\u00e1s Budav\u00e1ri and his team have created a user-friendly catalog of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, effectively putting all the insights they hold at our fingertips. During its 25 years orbiting 350 miles above Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed the way we view the universe. The so-called…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,2161,2543,2548,2553,2558],"class_list":["post-3684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","tag-tamas-budavari","tag-applied-mathematics-and-statistics","tag-hubble-space-telescope","tag-space","tag-space-telescope-science-institute","tag-hubble-source-catalog","issue-summer-2015"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Table of Contents for the Universe - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2015\/06\/a-table-of-contents-for-the-universe\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Table of Contents for the Universe - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Thanks to some \u201celegant\u201d math, Tam\u00e1s Budav\u00e1ri and his team have created a user-friendly catalog of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, effectively putting all the insights they hold at our fingertips. 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