Celeste May Change the Way Scientists View and Study the Universe

There may be a new model for studying and cataloguing the universe. Scientists have created "Celeste," a new statistical analysis model that's designed to enhance sky surveys.

Sky surveys are used to map and catalog regions of the sky, fuel statistical studies of large numbers of objects and enable interesting or rare objects to be studied in greater details. But the ways in which image datasets from these surveys are analyzed remains almost archaic in nature.

"There are very traditional approaches to doing astronomical surveys that date back to the photographic plate," said David Schlegel, one of the researchers, in a news release. "A lot of the terminology dates back to that as well. For example, we still talk about having a plate and comparing plates, when obviously we've moved way beyond that."

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) only began capturing data in 1998. While today there are multiple surveys and high-resolution instrumentation operating worldwide, the ability to easily access and share this data remains elusive.

Now, researchers have developed Celeste, a hierarchical model designed to catalog stars, galaxies and other light sources in the universe visible through the next generation of telescopes. It was also allow researchers to identify promising galaxies for spectrograph targeting, define galaxies they may want to explore further and help them better understand Dark Energy and the geometry of the universe.

"What we want to change here in a fundamental way is the way astronomers use these data," said Schlegel. "Celeste will be a much better model for identifying the astrophysical sources in the sky and the calibration parameters of each telescope. We will be able to mathematically define what we are solving, which is very different from the traditional approach, where it is this set of heuristics and you get this catalog of objects, then you try to ask the question: mathematically what was the problem I just solved?"

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