Why do we study the night sky?

NASA - Hubble Legacy Field Zoom-Out

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.

-Emmanuel Kant

Human innate desire to understand our universe and our place within it drives innovation

Above all, my group works on

democratizing knowledge, our Universe, and Artificial Intelligence

through

use and production of public data
innovation in AI
demistification of AI
broadening access to science

Above all, my group works on

democratizing knowledge, our Universe, and Artificial Intelligence

through

Human innate desire to understand our universe and our place within it drives innovation

NSF Award #2108841 Detecting and studying light echoes in the era of Rubin and Artificial Intelligence

NSF Award #2123264 Collaborative Research: HDR DSC: Delaware and Mid-Atlantic Data Science Corps

NSF Award #2308016 Every Datapoint Counts: Atmosphere-aided Flare Studies in the Rubin era

NSF Graudate Student Research Fellowship Shar Daniels

Current sponsored programs (PI Bianco):

Above all, my group works on

democratizing knowledge, our Universe, and Artificial Intelligence

through

use and production of public data
innovation in AI
demistification of AI
broadening access to science

Above all, my group works on

democratizing knowledge, our Universe, and Artificial Intelligence

through

Why do we study stellar explosions?

we are made of stars

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.

We are made of starstuff.

― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

largest explosion on earth 10,000,000 erg

typical supernova....

Why do we study stellar explosions?

a unique opportunity to study extreme energy events

A new, transformational observatory is about to start building a legacy for humanity

before human-made satellites forever change it

Building a legacy:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST

the Vera C. Rubin observatory will collect

20Tb of data every night. That is equivalent to

8,000 high definition movies

4,000 hours of tiktok videos

every night for 10 years

Building a legacy:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST

the Vera C. Rubin observatory will collect

20Tb of data every night. That is equivalent to

8,000 high definition movies

4,000 hours of tiktok videos

every night for 10 years

Building a legacy:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST

the Vera C. Rubin observatory will collect

20Tb of data every night.

A legacy dataset that belongs to all people in the USA giving access to never before seen corners of the Universe to all

We develop new technology

to satisfy our thirst for knowledge

We built the largest camera ever built for the

Vear C. Rubin Observatory

to look farther and wider into the sky than ever before

10 stars explode in the universe every second

Until the 1900s we would see 1 in a century

Until the 1980s we would see 1 in a decade

Until the 2010s we would see 1 in a month

With the Vera C. Rubin Observatory we will see 1000 every night !

How do we study stellar explosions?

with this much data we need Artificial Intelligence

How do we study stellar explosions?

with this much data we need Artificial Intelligence

a tricky combination of problems for AI

very faint signal
very rare

Light echoes are like a time machine:

light from stellar explosions that is reflecting off of the interstellar medium we can re-see stellar explosions from the past and study them with new technology

but they are so hard to find!

Xiaolong Li was a Ph.D. student at UD, now he is an LSST Catalyst Fellow.

He is building AI models to find them. AI can help, but AI innovation is needed

change over time
can have almost any shape

AILE: the first AI-based platform for the detection and study of Light Echoes

Award #2108841

AILE: the first AI-based platform for the detection and study of Light Echoes

Tatiana Acero Cuellar is a UNIDEL fellow:

she is Building simulated light echo images to help train AI models

If light echoes are too rare to build large training set to train AI, can we generate realistic light echo images with simulations?

Award #2108841

Testing the performance of MetaAI SAM on astronomical objects

Instead of building our own specialized AI, can we adapt the models that the industry produces?

That would save a lot of computational resources and computational resources have an environmental footprint!

Rodiat Ayinde graduate with a bachelor degree in Computer Science from Lincoln University

she was recruited through an NSF HDR Data Science Corps grant that sponsored collaborations between the University of Delaware and Lincoln University, the first degree granting Historically Black College and University, to build accessible educational offerings in Data Science

Award #2123264

What's even harder to study than stellar explosions?

Shar Daniels is a NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

They use telescopes and cameras in innovative ways to show the stars in their time evolution at milliseconds rate

and uses cutting edge AI (transformers) to discover new physical phenomena

NSF Graduate Research

Fellowship Program

time: 1 pixel = 3.0 milliseconds

space: 1 pixel = 1 arcsecond

What's even harder to study than stellar explosions?

Any phenomenon that changes rapidly, in less than hours, is a technological challenge in astronomy

Riley Clarke has devised a new method to measure flare temperatures by measuring the position of stars.

During the flare, as it gets hotter and its color changes, the star appears to move in the direction of the zenith by tiny amounts (fractions of arc seconds!).

What's even harder to study than stellar explosions?

Stellar flares are short lived (~minutes) brightening events caused by magnetic reconnections in stars' atmospheres. Stellar flare impact planetary habitability. Fast and unpredictable, they are hard to study and their physical properties, like temperature, are poorly constrained.