SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

ON THE face of it, telescopes and databases sound like

very different things. Telescopes sit on the tops of
mountains, and are pointed at the skies; databases sit on
computer hard disks, humming away and going nowhere.
Yet they have something in common: both allow
astronomers to explore the universe.

Modern telescopes are highly automated pieces of

machinery equipped with digital sensors that produce reams
of observational data. Such data can be stored, processed
and distributed just like other digital information. This
means it is no longer necessary for an astronomer actually
to visit a telescope to make observations. Instead, detailed
instructions can be sent to the observatorys staff and, once
the observations have been made, the data can be sent
back to the astronomera practice known as service
observing.

Many astronomers dislike this way of doing things, because

they enjoy the romance of observing under starry skies. But
in some cases it might not be necessary to do any observing
at all. If enough observational data were available in a huge
database, astronomers might find that the observations they
wanted had already been made, and that it was simply a
matter of retrieving the relevant information. One set of
observations can serve many different scientific purposes,
including some not considered when the observations were
made. Large astronomical databases could also make
entirely new discoveries possible through data
mininglooking for patterns in data from different
observations made at different times with different
instruments. In short, databases could be virtual
observatories, capable of looking at the whole sky at
once, over a period of several years or decades, rather
than at only a tiny patch of sky on a single night.

The first steps towards establishing such observatories are

now being taken. On May 19th, Americas National
Research Council recommended the allocation of $60m to
set up a national virtual observatory (NVO) as a key part
of its plans for the next decade of astronomical research. A
similar venture called ASTROVIRTEL has already been
created in Europe. Michael Turner, an astrophysicist at the
University of Chicago, suggests that, as such databases
grow, and the tools to extract data from them mature,
more and more astronomers will be going to the virtual
sky.

Seeing without looking

Virtual astronomy is becoming increasingly attractive for a
number of reasons. It used to be the case, for example, that
it cost less to make a new observation than to store the
results of an old one. But storage is now so cheap that
storing everything, for ever, has become common practice.

Another factor is the intense competition for observing time

on the worlds largest telescopes. On average, less than a
quarter of applications for observing time succeed. A virtual
observatory would also prevent unnecessary duplication of
observations, while still giving astronomers the data they
want.

Nor is there any shortage of raw material from which to

construct virtual observatories. Instead, astronomers are
now faced with vast quantities of data. (The Hubble Space
Telescope alone churns out 2 billion bytes per day.)
Traditionally, observations remain the exclusive property of
the astronomer who made them for one year. They are then
released to the wider astronomical community. The result is
a deluge of data, making it increasingly difficult for
researchers to keep track of, and retrieve, potentially useful
information.

ASTROVIRTEL, the European virtual observatory, will be the

first to open its digital doors. It is based on 7 trillion bytes
(terabytes) of data gathered by the Hubble and several
large ground-based telescopes that are operated by the
European Southern Observatory (ESO) at Paranal and La
Silla in Chile. The database, stored at the ESOs
headquarters in Garching in Germany, is growing by 4.5
terabytes a year, and is expected to swell to 100 terabytes
by 2005.

Although the ultimate aim is for ASTROVIRTEL to be

available online, astronomers will at first be invited to visit
the facility in person. Indeed, it will be necessary to book
observing time, just as with a real observatory. (Applicants
have until June 15th to submit research proposals, and a
handful will then be selected.) But the idea, says Benot
Pirenne, head of archive operations at Garching, is to find
out what sort of research virtual observatories can be used
for; to help astronomers to navigate around the various data
formats; to provide heavyweight computer hardware; and
to develop the necessary data-mining tools. The
ASTROVIRTEL programme will run for three years, at the
end of which its organisers will have a clearer idea of the
needs of virtual astronomers and will thus be better able to
serve them online. Another goal of the project is to develop
ways to ensure that virtual observatories can share and
exchange data easily.

In America, the NVO is still in the planning stages. By the

time it is set up, however, mountains of data will have piled
up from several automated sky surveys that are being
carried out by robotic telescopes. A major part of the NVO
will be the data from such efforts as the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey (SDSS), a five-year project that is now under way to
take images of most of the northern sky and to identify
hundreds of millions of stars, galaxies, quasars and other
objects. Mining the resulting terabyte or so of data will
allow astronomers to investigate the evolution of galaxies,
for example, since the SDSS will provide an enormous
sample of them.

And even the SDSS will represent only a single snapshot of

the sky. The proposed Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,
an even more ambitious automated survey, will carry out
the equivalent of a Sloan a week for a decade, producing
a terabyte of data per week and enabling astronomers with
powerful enough computers to examine several months
worth of observations, so as to investigate phenomena that
change over time. Other surveys will scan the skies of the
southern hemisphere, or the infra-red. The Hubbles
successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope, will also
produce vast quantities of new data.

Within a few decades, says Dr Turner, the entire

observable universe will have been digitised. Combining all
these data sources in a meaningful way, and extracting
useful information from them, will not be easy. But virtual
observatories will allow new kinds of questions to be
askedand new kinds of discoveries to be made.
Admittedly, as astronomers spend more time in front of
computers and less time peering through telescopes, some
of the joy of their profession will have been lost. But the
tradition of astronomical data-mining goes back a long way.
In the early 17th century, Johannes Kepler worked out the
laws of planetary motion as a result of years of analysis of
the observations made by Tycho Brahe. Neptune was also
discovered in 1846 after two mathematicians analysed
decades of observations of the anomalous motion of
Uranus to reveal the gravitational influence of an unseen
planet. So astronomers should not worry if, instead of
looking up at things, they now look things up instead.