IVOA Newsletter - October 2015 (pdf)

Created: September 30, 2015 - 22:01 UTC

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IVOA Newsletter Editors: Mark G. Allen, Deborah Baines, Chenzou Cui, August Muench & Ivan Zolotukhin.

The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) was formed in June 2002 with a mission to facilitate the international coordination and collaboration necessary for the development and deployment of the tools, systems and organizational structures necessary to enable the international utilization of astronomical archives as an integrated and interoperating virtual observatory. The IVOA now comprises 20 VO programs from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States and an inter-governmental organization (ESA). Membership is open to other national and international programs according to the IVOA Guidelines for Participation. You can read more about the IVOA and what we do at http://ivoa.net/about/.

What is the VO?

The Virtual Observatory (VO) aims to provide a research environment that will open up new possibilities for scientific research based on data discovery, efficient data access, and interoperability. The vision is of global astronomy archives connected via the VO to form a multiwavelength digital sky that can be searched, visualized, and analyzed in new and innovative ways. VO projects worldwide working toward this vision are already providing science capabilities with new tools and services. This newsletter, aimed at astronomers, highlights VO tools and technologies for doing astronomy research, recent papers, and upcoming events.

IVOA news

On July 29, 2015, the Popular Supernova Project was launched. It is the first astronomical citizen science project in China as a joint venture between China-VO and Xingming Amateur Astronomical Observatory. In the morning of Sep. 12, a supernova candidate was discovered by a 10-year old pupil. Inspired by the news, number of the registered users of China-VO platform raised rapidly to 105K by the end of September. Currently, two supernova candidates discovered by public users have been confirmed by professional observations.

The project webpage is prepared in Chinese; an English version is planned for a proper time in the future.

ASTERICS Virtual Observatory School

The ASTERICS project is organising a VO School at Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain. The goal of the school is twofold: Expose European astronomers and representatives of the ESFRI projects involved in ASTERICS to the variety of VO tools and services available today so that they can use them efficiently for their own research and gather requirement and feedback from them.

Important dates:

  • Deadline for submission of participants’ use cases: 13 November 2015
  • Deadline for registration: 30 November 2015
  • Meeting: 15-17 December 2015

More information can be found at the school website.

WWT Guided Tour Design Competition

The award ceremony of the 2nd WWT Guided Tour Contest was held on July 28, 2015. The contest was organized by China-VO, Microsoft Research and other partners, began in early 2015, and was designed to promote the concept of scientific data-based science education and the open sharing of scientific and technological resources and knowledge. About 100 tours were submitted by school students and amateur astronomers. Videos of awarded tours are released to the public at http://wwt.china-vo.org/tours2015/.

VO applications and implementation highlights

ESA Sky: the ESA Astronomy Multi-Mission Interface

We are pleased to announce the beta v1.0 release of ESA Sky, the ESA Astronomy Multi-Mission Interface, a science-driven discovery portal for all ESA Astronomy missions. ESA Sky provides simplified access to high level science-ready data products from ESA Astronomy missions and a number of ESA produced source catalogues. No prior knowledge of the involved ESA missions is needed, simply explore the sky with the sky exploration interface, or conduct single or multiple target searches. From a technical point of view, the system offers new all-sky multi-resolution maps of full mission datasets; detailed geometrical footprints to connect the all-sky mosaics to individual observations; direct access to the underlying mission-specific science archives; and uses the TAP and MOC VO protocols. The beta release contains data (imaging only) and catalogues from the following missions: INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton, HST, Hipparcos, ISO, Herschel, and Planck.

We are extremely interested in your feedback and would like to hear from you via our helpdesk. You can see a video demo of the ESA Sky beta or try the beta interface.

Acknowledgement: ESA Sky makes use of the Aladin sky atlas and HiPS (Hierarchical Progressive Surveys), developed at CDS, Strasbourg Observatory, France.

The Keck Observatory Archive

The Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) (website) has released a program-friendly interface to public images acquired with all nine Keck instruments equipped with an imaging mode. The interface is compliant with the latest VO-image access standard, Simple Image Access Protocol (SIAP_ v2, June, 2015). The interface is fully documented and includes a detailed description of the input and output parameters, examples for each instrument, a troubleshooting guide and a web-based query builder that allows users to create queries that are later run from a program.

TAO v2.0: The Theoretical Astrophysical Observatory

The Theoretical Astrophysical Observatory (TAO) houses data from popular cosmological N-body simulations and semi-analytic galaxy formation models, primarily focused on survey science. Mock catalogues can be built from the database without the need for any coding. Results can be funnelled through higher-level modules to build custom light-cones and images. TAO is accessible from anywhere you can access the internet.

TAO v2.0 has just been released with many front and back-end enhancements. These include the option to download premade mock catalogues (e.g. created in advance for a specific survey, like CANDELS or SDSS), significant improvements to the image module to make it easier to image your mock galaxies, and an update of the SAGE semi-analytic model to its public release version (Croton et al. 2015). Head over to TAO now and build your own universe!

TOPCAT TAP Improvements

The recent release (v4.3) of the table analysis tool TOPCAT features a major overhaul of its TAP window. TAP, the Table Access Protocol, lets you run flexible SQL-like queries on remote astronomical databases. The updated TAP window is easier to use and more powerful than before: improvements include the ability to search for datasets by table name or description, better query editing facilities, more useful information about the service you’re using, and a list of example queries to help you write your own, including examples specific to the current database. It also now works well with very large TAP services, including HEASARC from NASA (900 tables) and VizieR from CDS (30,000 tables).

More Information on TOPCAT TAP can be found: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/.

Some recent papers about VO-enabled science

The number fraction of discs around brown dwarfs in Orion OB1a and the 25 Orionis group
Downes, Juan José; Román-Zúñiga, Carlos; Ballesteros-Paredes, Javier; Mateu, Cecilia; Briceño, César; Hernández, Jesús; Petr-Gotzens, Monika G.; Calvet, Nuria; Hartmann, Lee; Mauco, Karina.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 450, 3490-3502 (2015).

We present a study of 15 new brown dwarfs belonging to the ˜7 Myr old 25 Orionis group and Orion OB1a subassociation with spectral types between M6 and M9 and estimated masses between ˜0.07 and ˜0.01 M⊙. By comparing them through a Bayesian method with low-mass stars (0.8 ≲ M/M⊙ ≲ 0.1) from previous works in the 25 Orionis group, we found statistically significant differences in the number fraction of classical T Tauri stars, Weak T Tauri stars, class II, evolved discs and purely photospheric emitters at both sides of the substellar mass limit. Particularly, we found a fraction of 3.9^{+2.4}{-1.6} per cent low-mass stars classified as Classic T Tauri star and class II or evolved discs, against a fraction of 33.3^{+10.8}{-9.8} per cent in the substellar mass domain. Our results support the suggested scenario in which the dissipation of discs is less efficient for decreasing mass of the central object.

Refereed Publications

The ADS query we manually curate for the bibliography in this newletter.

All ADS links mentioning the “virtual observatory” in the abstract.

All refereed publications mentioning the “virtual observatory” in the abstract.

VO calendar

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