How big data is transforming what we know about the universe

By Muiris MacCarthaigh, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, Queen's University Belfast
Joshua Weston, PhD Candidate, School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen's University Belfast

Science in the modern era is increasingly reliant on enormous datasets and automated analysis. In astronomy, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – a ten-year survey covering the entire southern sky almost a thousand times over the next decade – will test the limits of this reliance.

The Rubin observatory, located on a mountaintop called Cerro Pachón in Chile, is expected to catalogue the night sky in exquisite…

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