Astronomy and Big Data

The technology used in astronomy has increased rapidly over the past couple of years.  One of the factors is we can now build larger telescopes that are able to image gigantic portions of the sky.  Also, the sensitivity of the light detectors has drastically increases.  This has causes an exponential increase in the data available to astronomy.  By 2015 a telescope will be developed that can image three billion pixels.  It is estimated that there are a hundred billion galaxies in the universe.  So far, the data storage has been able to keep up with the massive output from these telescopes, but the real problem has been how to search and analyze the data. Without the current advancements in data mining and big data a project like the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space telescope would not be possible.  The Kepler telescope measures the light of 170,000 stars extremely precisely at regular intervals in order to finds small fluctuations in light which signifies the presence of planets orbiting these stars.  Also, the GALEX program, which measure the ultra-violet light from an entire sky view has already produced 20 terabytes of information.  But on the horizon there are telescopes that will be able to produce petabytyes (1000 terabytes) of information.  So, it is quite obvious that big data and data mining will be critical to the future of astronomy and its almost infinite amount of data that can be discovered.

Source:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/how-big-data-is-changing-astronomy-again/255917/