

#Shear brilliance software#
Specialised image processing and machine learning software ( Zuntz 2013) has therefore been developed for use with galaxy images from telescopes like LSST and its predecessors. With the billions of galaxies expected to be observed by LSST, such approaches are unfeasible. In times gone by, the measurements needed to determine properties like cosmic shear might have been done by hand, or at least with human-supervised computer processing. The LSST will produce images of galaxies in a wide variety of frequency bands of the visible electromagnetic spectrum, with each image giving different information about the galaxy's nature and history. Thanks are due to the members of the GridPP community for their assistance and support throughout." Having completed the work, Joe and his colleagues are able to carry out shear analysis on vast image sets much faster than was previously the case.

When the LSST is fully operating researchers will face a galactic data deluge - and our work will prepare us for the analytical challenge ahead," said Sarah Bridle, Professor of Astrophysics.ĭr George Beckett, the LSST-UK Science Centre Project Manager based at The University of Edinburgh, added: "The pilot has been a great success. "Our overall aim is to tackle the mystery of the dark universe - and this pilot project has been hugely significant. The pilot research team based at The Manchester of University was led by Dr Joe Zuntz, a cosmologist originally at Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory and now a researcher at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. This in turn will help prepare for the analysis of the expected 200 petabytes of data the LSST will collect when it starts operating in 2023. In preparation to the LSST starting its revolutionary scanning, a pilot research project has helped researchers detect and map out the cosmic shear seen across the night sky, one of the tell-tale signs of the dark matter and dark energy thought to make up some 95 per cent of what we see in the Universe.

LSST will be able to map the entire visible sky. The Manchester team are part of the collaborative project to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a new kind of telescope currently under construction in Chile and designed to conduct a 10-year survey of the dynamic Universe. Researchers at The University of Manchester have used resources provided by GridPP – who represent the UK's contribution to the computing grid used to find the Higgs boson at CERN – to run image processing and machine learning algorithms on thousands of images of galaxies from the international Dark Energy Survey.
