Astronomers Build a One-Stop Universe Data Hub | Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
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Astronomers Build a One-Stop Universe Data Hub
07.07.26
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The project will connect data from different sky surveys to each other in formats available to analyze without supercomputing, even on a laptop
Image of jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole, from data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope. The Multimodal Universe (MMU) project brings data from missions like these together to find new cosmic discoveries without the need for supercomputing power.
Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Astronomers spend much of their time mapping the universe, but until now their results have been collected and archived in so many different ways that the data can’t talk to each other.<br>Each large telescope mission, project or program has its own formats, naming conventions, and software tricks. And since discoveries in space science and other big-data fields increasingly come from combining data across projects, these differences may block the way forward to new science.<br>The Multimodal Universe (MMU) is a new effort to fix that. Astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have led an initiative across multiple institutes to reshape more than 80 terabytes of observations, like galaxy images from radio to X-rays, spectra of stars and galaxies, and time-series of flickering variable stars, into one consistent, user-friendly system.<br>“The idea is simple: you shouldn't need a Ph.D. in a specific survey's archival system to load the data from that survey and do cool science with it,” writes CfA lead scientist Mike Smith in a blog post about the project.<br>With MMU, scientists and students can pull in data from many sky surveys using the same tools and formats, even on their laptops.<br>Read the full story : 80TB+ of astronomy for the HDD-poor: crossmatch the Multimodal Universe from your laptop<br>Smith is a Center for Astrophysics post-doctoral researcher funded by Lium.