Pan-STARRS releases largest digital sky survey to the world

VIDEO NEWS RELEASE

Contact:

Kenneth Chambers, 1 808-956-9844

Astronomer, Institute for Astronomy

Roy R Gal, (808) 956-6235

Associate Astronomer, Institute for Astronomy

Astronomer, Institute for AstronomyAssociate Astronomer, Institute for Astronomy

Posted: Dec 19, 2016







Pan-STARRS1 Observatory on Haleakalā Pan-STARRS1 Observatory on Haleakalā

Link to video and interviews: http://bit.ly/2hy3BDO

The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project at the University of Hawai‘i Institute for Astronomy is publicly releasing the world's largest digital sky survey today, via the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

"The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies," said Ken Chambers, director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories. "Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe."

"With this release we anticipate that scientists -- as well as students and even casual users -- around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by Pan-STARRS," Chambers added.

The four years of data comprise 3 billion separate sources, including stars, galaxies and various other objects. The immense collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to one billion selfies or one hundred times the total content of Wikipedia.

The first Pan-STARRS observatory is a 1.8-meter telescope at the summit of Haleakalā on Maui. In May 2010, it embarked on a digital sky survey of the sky in visible and near infrared light. This was the first survey to observe the entire sky visible from Hawai‘i multiple times in many colors of light, with the goal of finding moving, transient and variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth. The survey took approximately four years to complete, and scanned the sky 12 times in each of five filters.

"Achieving the high quality of the Pan-STARRS1 measurements and maintaining it over such an enormous quantity of data was a unique computational challenge, and the results are a tribute to the dedicated efforts of our small team of scientists at the UH IfA and our collaborators who worked to process and calibrate the extraordinary volume of raw image data," said Eugene Magnier, lead of the Pan-STARRS Image Processing team.

This research program was undertaken by the PS1 Science Consortium -- a collaboration among 10 research institutions in four countries with support from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Consortium observations for the sky survey, mapping everything visible from Hawai‘i, were completed in April 2014. This data is now being released publicly.

"It's great to see the Pan-STARRS1 data release supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) now made available to the general astronomical community," said Nigel Sharp, program director in NSF's astronomical sciences division. "I am impressed by the work the team invested to make the best-calibrated and best-characterized data set they could. I eagerly anticipate the science from mining these data."

The roll-out is being done in two stages. Today's release is the "Static Sky," which is the average of each of those individual epochs. For every object, there's an average value for its position, brightness and colors. In 2017, the second set of data will be released, providing a catalog that gives the information and images for each individual epoch.

The Space Telescope Science Institute provides the storage hardware, the computers that handle the database queries, and the user-friendly interfaces to access the data.

"The cooperation between STScI and the Pan-STARRS team at the University of Hawai‘i has been essential to ensuring that this initial data release is successful," explained Marc Postman, head of the community missions office at STScI, and liaison between STScI and the PS1 Consortium. "STScI was a natural partner to host the Pan-STARRS public archive given its extensive experience serving astronomy data to the international community. In advance of the release of the Pan-STARRS data, STScI staff helped perform checks of data quality, helped write archive user documentation, tested and installed the local data storage and database query system, and designed, built and deployed the web-based user interfaces to the archive system."

The survey data resides in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), which serves as NASA's repository for all of its optical and ultraviolet-light observations, some of which date to the early 1970s. It includes all of the observational data from such space astrophysics missions as Hubble, Kepler, GALEX, and a wide variety of other telescopes, as well as several all-sky surveys. Pan-STARRS marks the nineteenth mission to be archived in MAST.

The data can be accessed at http://panstarrs.stsci.edu.

The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawai‘i, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation Grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Founded in 1967, the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa conducts research into galaxies, cosmology, stars, planets, and the sun. Its faculty and staff are also involved in astronomy education, deep space missions, and in the development and management of the observatories on Haleakalā and Maunakea. The Institute operates facilities on the islands of O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i.

Link to video and interviews: http://bit.ly/2hy3BDO

BROLL (1 minute, 20 seconds):

Images from Pan-STARRS1 (5 shots)

Images of Pan-STARRS1 (3 shots)

SOUNDBITES:

Eugene Magnier - Astronomer, UH Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (6 seconds)

"If we had printed it in one giant image, it would cover an area of about one and a half miles long."

Kenneth Chambers - Astronomer, UH Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (10 seconds)

"Discoveries that will come after this release, will be, there will be more of them than the ones we have been doing over the past four or five years. And that's part of the point. Get it out there to everyone."

Magnier (7 seconds)

"By releasing the billions of objects in our data base, people can go and do their own explorations. They can look for the things they want to study themselves."

For more information, visit: http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/panstarrs_release/