These questions of life, the universe, and everything are just some of the big topics that motivate the new Center for Decoding the Universe at Stanford.
“Compared to some other disciplines, astronomers are relatively early adopters of cutting-edge statistics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools,” said Risa Wechsler, KIPAC director and the Humanities and Sciences Professor and professor of physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S). Wechsler is director of the new center with co-director Susan Clark, assistant professor of physics in H&S. “We have a lot of fun advantages in astronomy in that we have a lot of data, and they are increasingly complex.”
The amount of data available is increasing at an astronomical scale, and these researchers have already been at the forefront of that abundance. Just recently, SLAC researchers and scientists, including Wechsler, helped with the development and creation of the world’s largest digital camera for astronomy. As part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, the LSST Camera will image the entire Southern Hemisphere over the next decade, producing 15 terabytes of data every night.
“On the astrophysics side of things, we are in a data revolution. We are moving into an era where the volume and rate of new astronomical data absolutely can’t be taken advantage of by many of our traditional techniques,” Clark said.
The explosion of data coincides with rapid developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, which can be used to develop and apply tools to analyze what’s coming in.
“We have really interesting challenges right now: How do you deal with having 20 billion 3D objects that you only have 2D images of? How do you get other information about them? How do you put together different kinds of data with different wavelengths?” said Wechsler, who is also a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at SLAC. “It’s a special time in astronomy and a special time in AI. Bringing them together right now is very exciting.”
That’s where the faculty of SDS comes in. SDS brings together researchers who are asking big questions of their datasets with experts in the latest machine learning, computation, statistics, data science, and analysis techniques.
“Everyone on campus is more or less involved in data science – it’s a theme that cuts across all of our schools. The idea was how can we be better than the sum of our parts?” said Emmanuel Candès, SDS faculty director and the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics in H&S. “There are big problems in astrophysics, and a lot of them are data driven. Can we create a bit of magic by having the main scientists like Risa talking to methods people like myself? Together we can do more than if we just work in silos on these issues.”
The partnership builds deep collaborations and advances data science methodologies and astrophysics simultaneously, and adds value and meaning to all involved.
Paraphrasing the late John Tukey, “Statisticians should play in the backyard of others,” said Candès. “It’s very important that our work is inspired by real questions. These interactions through the SDS centers benefit our colleagues, and me because I’m getting exposed to things that matter. It orients my work in a direction that can be really impactful.”
The Rubin Observatory’s terabytes of nightly data are just one resource available to Stanford researchers at the Center for Decoding the Universe. With this information, they aim to address some significant questions.
“We want to use those data to answer the most fundamental questions about the universe: How do stars and galaxies work? What is the universe made of? What is the nature of dark matter? Why is the universe expanding?” Wechsler said.
They are truly universal questions and ones that speak to what it means to be human.
“Humans from all cultures and from the beginning of time have wondered about our place in the universe,” she said. “Now I have this privilege to be a part of the generation of humans that is really mapping most of the universe. Maybe it doesn’t impact our day-to-day lives, but it does impact how we think of ourselves as humans. That context is very important.”
One of Wechsler’s passions is dark matter, which makes up most of the mass of the universe and yet isn’t well understood. The LSST at Rubin is going to make maps of dark matter in the southern sky that will help scientists understand how it has evolved over the last 13 billion years. Clues come directly from the light that Rubin sees, as well as from the way that gravity distorts that light using so-called “gravitational lensing.” Gravitational lensing and Rubin’s new ability to detect the tiniest galaxies in the universe can both provide novel insights into the nature of dark matter.
Clark’s research is focused on the interstellar medium – the stuff between stars and galaxies. Much of her data are measurements of light at different wavelengths. The light traces emission and absorption of dust, gas, and stars. She can use that information to explore what’s happening in our own Milky Way galaxy.
“To have the clearest picture of the physics, you want to observe your galaxy in many different ways, across wavelengths, total intensity, and polarization. Then you have to figure out how to use all that multimodal data to extract the physical meaning that you are after,” Clark said.
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Stanford Data Science and KIPAC members Emmanuel Candès, Risa Wechsler, Susan Clark, and Chris Mentzel at the Center for Decoding the Universe fall forum. | PaulSakuma.com Photography
“The wonderful thing is that there are people we’re bringing together here who think – often in very different ways – about ways to divine meaning from large or multimodal or noisy and complicated data,” Clark said. “We’re all solving little pieces of challenges that are before us in our particular application that could really be the key to sparking some innovation – as long as we can find a way to have those conversations with each other.”
