Waffles and big data in the universe

Waffles and big data were on the menu at the most recent gathering of Astronomy on Tap Seattle at Peddler Brewing Company in Ballard.

Fulmer at work. Photo: Astronomy on Tap Seattle

Leah Fulmer, who is working at the University of Washington on her Ph.D. in astronomical data science, gave a talk titled, “Data-Driven Astronomy in the 2020s and Beyond.” Fulmer explained that we’re in the midst of a “data tsunami” that’s been growing over the last three decades of astronomical surveys.

Back in the 1990s the Palomar Digital Sky Survey and the Two Micron All-Sky Survey each collected about a terabyte of data. That’s a trillion bytes; 10¹² bytes. Enough to fill a thousand one-gigabyte smartphones.
The 2000s brought the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. These collected in the tens of terabytes of data. In the 2010s Pan-STARRS collected a petabyte of data; a quadrillion bytes.

In the future this astronomical growth in data collection will continue. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) under construction in Chile will survey the entire night sky every few nights for ten years. It will ultimately collect an astounding 500 petabytes of data—that’s 20 terabytes every single night.

“SDSS had a total data collection of 40 terabytes,” Fulmer pointed out. “We’re going to have one SDSS every two nights in the 2020s. This is a big freaking deal.”

On top of the data, Fulmer noted that the LSST will alert its network when it finds something interesting. Given the amount of data, Fulmer said there will be ten million alerts every night, or about 232 every second.

“This is overwhelming; this is a data tsunami,” she said. “With this sort of data collection astronomers cannot do our science in the way we have up until this point.”

A new way to look at data

Up until recently astronomers would apply for telescope time, make their observations, take the data home, and analyze it. That won’t work in the era of big data for a couple of reasons. First, you can’t jam that much data onto your laptop. Second, there just aren’t enough astronomers to sort through data on objects one by one. As you might guess, we need the help of computers.

“Specifically, we need the help of machine learning,” Fulmer said. This can be both “supervised” and “unsupervised” learning. Astronomers can identify objects by their light curves, and the computers can be taught what those are. That’s supervised. In unsupervised learning, the computers can go out on their own and sort various observations into categories with similar characteristics, and we can figure out what’s in each category.

Once you figure that out, a data broker like ANTARES (the Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System, and yes, astronomers still rule at acronyms) can let the right people know about discoveries in a timely manner.

Fulmer said it’s interesting that ANTARES will never look at the sky, just at data, and that many future astronomers may never visit a telescope, just analyze the data. Different fields can learn from each other about how to process all of this information.

Fulmer finds the era of big data exciting.

“It’s not just data-driven astronomy, it’s data-driven everything,” she said.

Astronomy with your breakfast

N. Nicole Sanchez is working on her Ph.D. in astronomy at the UW, and her research interest is in spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way and how they evolve. This, naturally, led her to think of galaxies as waffles. Thus the title of her talk, “Black Holes, Gas, and Waffles.”

Spiral galaxies form into disks, she explained, and a waffle is a disk. The galaxies have a central bulge, represented on the waffle by a big pat of butter. Marshmallows, suspended by toothpicks, represent globular clusters of stars. Red and blue sprinkles represent old red stars and young blue ones. You just have to imagine the supermassive black hole at the center of the waffle. It may be massive, but it’s super small compared to the size of the waffle.

Sanchez came up with the idea for this model while teaching at the UW in the “Protostars” summer science camp for middle school girls the last couple of years. In the waffle model, syrup represents the gas in the galaxy.

“That’s what you’re making your stars out of, so there’s going to be a lot in your disk,” Sanchez said.
In fact, her faculty advisors got wind of the waffle model and said it would need A LOT of syrup, which led to the hilarious twitter thread below. Click on it to see the academic discussion.

Also! For those of you interested in the galaxy waffles: Here’s a nice example from class!
Waffle galaxy disk
Marshmellow globular clusters
Cherry bulge/bar
Red and blue sprinkles for stars
And syrup gas 
Plus a nicely labeled diagram  pic.twitter.com/vw8Pnt7gZO

— Nicole “Hella Metal” Sanchez (@the_n_nicole) August 15, 2018

Sanchez admitted that her waffle galaxy may be “a bit too simplified” as a model. But the syrup is important.

“There’s actually tons of gas around really all galaxies, in what’s called the circumgalactic medium,” Sanchez said. The gas is important to the evolution of a galaxy. It feeds the black hole and helps  form stars.

Sanchez studies galaxies by using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations.

“I put a bunch of particles in a box, turn on gravity, and let time happen,” she laughed. After running a simulation she looks for a galaxy similar to the Milky Way, and examines interactions between the galaxy’s supermassive black hole and the circumgalactic medium.

“The supermassive black hole is actually really vital to the evolution of the CGM because it’s moving all of this metal that’s being created in the hearts of stars in the disk of the galaxy and it’s propagating them out into the CGM,” Sanchez explained. Without a supermassive black hole, the circumgalactic medium would not look like what astronomers have observed.

Pass the syrup.