As ever more ambitious space surveys begin to create unprecedented mountains of data, Paul Fisher Cockburn asks if the future of astronomy will be found in AI
Paul Fisher Cockburn is a science and astronomy writer
As the late Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.” And, to be fair, he wasn’t wrong. For astronomers – especially those focusing on cosmology – this has one obvious consequence. The more detailed and accurate their studies of such a “really big” cosmos become, the larger the amount of data they are likely to generate – and have to process. Arguably this has been a looming problem ever since astronomers first started sticking cameras onto their telescopes, but the latest digital technologies have pushed the issue to the foreground like nothing else before.
Take the Square Kilometre Array, featured earlier in this month’s issue. Once it’s fully operational, it will create terabytes of data every second.
The latest European Space Agency (ESA) mission, the Euclid space telescope (launched on 1 June 2023), is another prime example. Its mission is essentially an attempt to measure the geometry of the entire Universe, improving our understanding of dark matter and dark energy. It requires the incredibly precise observation of billions of stars and galaxies. The amount of data that the mission will generate during its official six-year mission is almost inconceivable.
“What I think is interesting is that no human will look at all the Euclid data. It’ll be too big, it’ll never happen,” explains Andrew N Taylor, professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh. “There’s a good chance that if anyone picks on a random piece of sky, no other human will have ever looked at that bit of sky in such detail before.”
Information overload
Andrew has been part of the ESA’s Euclid Consortium, which runs the space telescope, for almost 20 years, helping devise the initial concept, the design of the mission and its science goals. During the last 10 years, as the telescope and its various optics and detectors were designed, built and tested before launch, his focus – along with many others’ – shifted towards data analysis.
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