Speaker:	Mario Hamuy & Francisco Forster (U Chile)
Title:	The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics MAS: Astronomy in the era of big data (Mario Hamuy), HIgh cadence transient Survey (HITS): real-time detection of supernovae and other transients with DECam (Francisco Forster)
Date (JST):	Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 13:30 - 14:30
Place:	Seminar Room A
Related File:	1286.pdf
Abstract:	I will present an overview of the new Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS), a research center recently approved for a period of 5+5 years by the Millennium Science Initiative of the Ministry of Economy of Chile. At the intersection of astrophysics, statistics and informatics, the main purpose of MAS is to deal with the dramatic paradigm shifts that observational astronomy is facing today in the big data era. (Mario Hamuy) At the Astroinformatics Laboratory of the Center for Mathematical Modelling (CMM) at the University of Chile and the Millennium Institute for Astronomy (MAS) we have developed a novel transient detection pipeline to be used in real-time with data from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). DECam is a 520 Megapixel CCD camera with an unprecedented wide angle field of view mounted on the 4m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). During five contiguous nights in the first week of March of 2014 we were able to achieve the real-time data analysis of more than 120 square degrees of the sky with a cadence of only two hours, or 400 billion pixels, with a processing time of less than one exposure time for every image. We were able to discover 12 newly exploding SNe in almost real-time, we found thousands of previously unknown asteroids and hundreds of variable stars that can be used to map the structure of the outer parts of the Milky Way. (Francisco Forster)

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