The Variable Universe


Wednesday, 07 December 2016 8 a.m. — 9 a.m. MST

AURA Lecture Hall

NOIRLab South Colloquia
ASHISH MAHABAL (California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) and AURA-O Visiting Scientist)

LSST will discover one to ten million transients every night. This is orders of magnitude more than the discovery rate of current surveys. This will result in a great opportunity for not just astronomers studying variability, but also for statisticians and mathematicians. The Transients and Variable Stars Science Collaboration and the Informatics and Statistics Science Collaboration together have about 200 members, and yet there are a large number of avenues or research and exploration that are completely open. I will talk about some of the subgroups, and their roadmaps. I will also mention the year-long program currently underway at the Statistical and Mathematical Sciences Institute with several LSST members active. In both cases I will mention opportunities to get involved. I will connect these with precursor datasets and with wanting to classify everything, and having to do much of that through machine learning for lack of enough follow-up resources and citizen scientists.