Posts with the Tag Solar System:

  • The Loneliest Star in the Sky

    sky images and a distribution plot

    The loneliest star in the sky on the left, and on the right a somewhat more lonelier one (it's explained in the text). The inset shows the distribution of the 500 loneliest stars on the whole sky in Galactic coordinates.

    In early December, the object catalogue of Gaia's data release 3 was published (“eDR3“), and I've been busy in various ways on this data off and on since then – see, for instance, the The Case of the disappearing bits on this blog.

    One of the things I have missed when advising people on projects with previous Gaia data releases is a table that, for every object, gives the nearest neighbour. And so for this release I've created it and christened it, perhaps just a bit over-grandiosely, “Gaia eDR3 Autocorrelation”. Technically, it is just a long (1811709771 rows, to be precise) list of pairs of Gaia eDR3 source ids, the ids of their nearest neighbour, and a spherical distance between.

    This kind of data is useful for many applications, mostly when looking for objects that are close together or (more often) things that fail for such close pairs for a wide variety of reasons. I have taken some pains to not only have close neighbours, though, because sometimes you may want specifically objects far away from others.

    As in the case of this article's featured image: The loneliest star in the sky (as seen by Gaia, that is) is eDR3 6049144983226879232, which is 4.3 arcminutes from its neighbour, 6049144021153793024, which in turn is the second-loneliest star in the sky. They are, perhaps a bit surprisingly, in Ophiuchus (and thus fairly close to the Milky Way plane), and (probably) only about 150 parsec from Earth. Doesn't sound too lonely, hm? Turns out: these stars are lonely because dust clouds blot out all their neighbours.

    Rank three is in another dust cloud, this time in Taurus, and so it continues in low Galactic latitude to rank 8 (4402975278134691456) at Galactic latitude 36.79 degrees; visualising the thing, it turns out it's again in a dark cloud. What about rank 23 at 83.92 Galactic (3954600105683842048)? That's probably bona-fide, or at least it doesn't look very dusty in the either DSS or PanSTARRS. Coryn (see below) estimates it's about 1100 parsec away. More than 1 kpc above the galactic disk: that's more what I had expected for lonely stars.

    Looking at the whole distribution of the 500 loneliest stars (inset above), things return a bit more to what I had expected: Most of them are around the galactic poles, where the stellar density is low.

    So: How did I find these objects? Here's the ADQL query I've used:

    SELECT TOP 500
      ra, dec, source_id, phot_g_mean_mag, ruwe,
      r_med_photogeo,
      partner_id, dist,
      COORD2(gavo_transform('ICRS', 'GALACTIC',
        point(ra, dec))) AS glat
    FROM
      gedr3dist.litewithdist
      NATURAL JOIN gedr3auto.main
    ORDER BY dist DESC
    

    – run this on the TAP server at http://dc.g-vo.org/tap (don't be shy, it's a cheap query).

    Most of this should be familiar to you if you've worked through the first pages of ADQL course. There's two ADQL things I'd like to advertise while I have your attention:

    1. NATURAL JOIN is like a JOIN USING, except that the database auto-selects what column(s) to join on by matching the columns that have the same name. This is a convenient way to join tables designed to be joined (as they are here). And it probably won't work at all if the tables haven't been designed for that.
    2. The messy stuff with GALACTIC in it. Coordinate transformations had a bad start in ADQL; the original designers hoped they could hide much of this; and it's rarely a good idea in science tools to hide complexity essentially everyone has to deal with. To get back on track in this field, DaCHS servers since about version 1.4 have been offering a user defined function gavo_transfrom that can transform (within reason) between a number of popular reference frames. You will find more on it in the server's capabilities (in TOPCAT: the “service” tab). What is happening in the query is: I'm making a Point out of the RA and Dec given in the catalogue, tell the transform function it's in ICRS and ask it to make Galactic coordinates from it, and then take the second element of the result: the latitude.

    And what about the gedr3dist.litewithdist table? That doesn't look a lot like the gaiaedr3.gaiasource we're supposed to query for eDR3?

    Well, as for DR2, I'm again only carrying a “lite” version of the Gaia catalogue in GAVO's Heidelberg data center, stripped down to the columns you absolutely cannot live without even for the most gung-ho science; it's called gaia.edr3lite.

    But then my impression is that almost everyone wants distances and then hacks something to make Gaia's parallax work for them. That's a bad idea as the SNR goes down to levels very common in the Gaia result catalogue (see 2020arXiv201205220B if you don't take my word for it). Hence, I'm offering a pre-joined view (a virtual table, if you will) with the carefully estimated distances from Coryn Bailer-Jones, and that's this gedr3dist.litewithdist. Whenever you're doing something with eDR3 and distances, this is where I'd point you first.

    Oh, and I should be mentioning that, of course, I figured out what is in dust clouds and what is not with TOPCAT and Aladin as in our tutorial TOPCAT and Aladin working together (which needs a bit of an update, but you'll figure it out).

    There's a lot more fun to be had with this (depending on what you find fun in). What about finding the 10 arcsec-pairs with the least different luminosities (which might actually be useful for testing some optics)? Try this:

    SELECT TOP 300
      a.source_id, partner_id, dist,
      a.phot_g_mean_mag AS source_mag,
      b.phot_g_mean_mag AS partner_mag,
      abs(a.phot_g_mean_mag-b.phot_g_mean_mag) AS magdiff
    FROM gedr3auto.main
      NATURAL JOIN gaia.edr3lite AS a
      JOIN gaia.edr3lite AS b
        ON (partner_id=b.source_id)
    WHERE
      dist BETWEEN 9.999/3600 AND 10.001/3600
      AND a.phot_g_mean_mag IS NOT NULL
      AND b.phot_g_mean_mag IS NOT NULL
    ORDER BY magdiff ASC
    

    – this one takes a bit longer, as there's many 10 arcsec-pairs in eDR3; the query above looks at 84690 of them. Of course, this only returns really faint pairs, and given the errors stars that weak have they're probably not all that equal-luminosity as that. But fixing all that is left as an exercise to the reader. Given there's the RP and BP magnitude columns, what about looking for the most colourful pair with a given separation?

    Acknowledgement: I couldn't have coolly mumbled about Ophiuchus or Taurus without the SCS service ivo://cds.vizier/vi/42 (”Identification of a Constellation From Position, Roman 1982”).

    Update [2021-02-05]: I discovered an extra twist to this story: Voyager 1 is currently flying towards Ophiuchus (or so Wikipedia claims). With an industrial size package of artistic licence you could say: It's coming to keep the loneliest star company. But of course: by the time Voyager will be 150 pc from earth, eDR3 6049144983226879232 will quite certainly have left Ophiuchus (and Voyager will be in a completely different part of our sky, that wouldn't look familar to us at all) – so, I'm afraid apart from a nice conincidence in this very moment (galactically speaking), this whole thing won't be Hollywood material.

  • GAVO at the Northern Spring Interop

    A cake celebrating IVOA 2002-2017

    15 Years of IVOA: The birthday cake our Shanghai hosts prepared for us.

    Every half year, VO enthusiasts from all over the world gather for an “Interoperability conference”, or Interop for short. The latest such event, the Shanghai Interop 2017, ended Friday a week ago. It has been a “long” one again after the short southern spring Interop in Trieste last year (featured in this blog).

    As usual, it was a week of many discussions and much consensus-building. In this post, I'd like to mention a few of the GAVO-related contributions; links typcially go to slides or lecture notes PDFs.

    On the Registry side of things, we're currently (among many other things) briding the gap between DOIs and the Registry in VOResource 1.1, and we invited registry providers to take up the new features, as well as proposing how to update RegTAP (which is used to actually query the Registry) to cope with the new metadata.

    Also in Registry, our efforts of almost a decade to properly support registering tables and similar data collections bore fruit (Britain's Mark Taylor reported on his experiences taking up our current proposal), and the fairly spectacular new Aladin V10 (presented by the CDS' Pierre Fernique, who showed off what I'm tempted to call a “visual registry interface”) urgently needs what we've developed over the years.

    We furthermore reported on new steps to finally let people search the registry using Space-Time constraints (spoiler: the tech is almost there, registry records need lots of work).

    Spatial searches in the registries are one thing enabled by storing and searching for MOCs in relational databases, as was reported by Markus Nullmeier over in an Applications session. The setting may already tell you that these MOCs (Multi Order Coverages, a healpix-based way of representing fairly arbitrary areas on the sky) have applications far beyond Registry.

    Also in Apps, Ole reported on progress in packaging VO applications for easy and reliable installation, in this case for Debian and derivatives. Finally for Apps, Margarida reported on getting lines and line lists into the spectral analysis package SPLAT: Implementation of SLAP and VAMDC interfaces in SPLAT-VO.

    In the wider area of data access protocols and underlying data models, we contributed to Marco's talk on the long-overdue facelifting for the VO's bedrock, Simple Cone Search (Keeping SCS up-to-date within DAL landscape) – the fact that there's an installed base of 15000 of such services may let you guess that we need to tread lightly here. On the bleeding-edge side of things, we presented our current ideas on how, eventually, several data models, data modelling as such and the annotation of data according to these data models might play together in publishing time domain data with DACHS (previously featured on this blog in a slightly less technical way).

    We also talked about education and outreach. Hendrik reported on our ADQL course and how it helps future astronomers learn dealing efficiently with even very large datasets. Hendrik's long-lasting dedication to these topics did not go unpunished at this interop: since the Exec meeting on the Interop Wednesday he is vice-chairing the education interest group of the IVOA. Back in the session I also mused a bit about what metadata changes are needed to make the VO tutorial collection VOTT more useful.

    It is a particular pleasure for me to mention that the IVOA has a new interest group: “Solar System”. Regular readers of the blog will have noticed that I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for that crowd, and so I gave a short overview over how DaCHS is used among them, too.

    And that's just the official programme. Much more fixing, designing, and discussion went on between sessions or in the evenings. The latter, of course, included some decidedly less technical aspects. Including, as pictured above, a nice birthday cake for the IVOA, as it is now 15 year since the first Interop meeting in January 2002.

  • And the Solar System, too

    Virtual Observatory technologies are increasingly being adopted outside of “core” astronomy in the vicinity of the optical band (to which they have had, I'll have to admit, a certain slant) . An excellent example for that trend is the Europlanet community. Their goal is to make solar system data accessible without fiddling, and they are employing a wide range of VO standards for that. At the heart of their efforts are TAP and the VO Registry.

    While the usual VO client software will of course work fine with their services, they are offering a nice web-based discovery tool executing queries against an increasing number of services. Such uniform quering over many services is possible is because all of them implement TAP and host EPNcore tables. The resulting interface, also known as EPN-TAP, allows for very flexible discovery and retrieval of solar system data products, much like ObsTAP does for astronomical observations outside of the solar system.

    Since quite a few EPN-TAP services are built using GAVO's DaCHS publication suite, I was invited to this week's VESPA implementation workshop 2017 in Graz to help the data providers set up their services.

    I can't deny that I'm somewhat excited when I see how our software is used to publish spectra of the ice blocks in Saturn's ring taken by the lonely Cassini spacecraft still orbiting the gas giant, or data transmitted by Rosetta, now (and for who knows how long) sitting on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There's even an upcoming archive of solar system alerts that may, according to its builders, include events like meteor showers on Mars. I can almost hear my code whisper “I've archived signals of C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate”.

    Even documentation can become otherworldly in this business: Already in February, DaCHS has learnt to procude GeoJSON, a format common in the GIS community and also adopted by Europlanet – planetology has lots of common ground with geoinformatics. And in the reference documentation on annotating tables to enable that, when I wrote “standards-compliant GeoJSON clients will interpret your coordinates as WGS84 on Earth if you leave [frame annotation] out”, I was severely tempted to add “which is probably not what you want” and feel like Spaceman Spiff.

    Romantic space adventures aside, after this intense week, not only are there several additional or improved EPN-TAP services from places ranging from Pasadena to Villafranca to Warsaw in the pipeline, the close interaction with the data providers has also led to very significant improvements to DaCHS' EPN-TAP support. The tutorial chapter on EPN-TAP and the reference documentation linked from there already reflect the results of this workshop. You'll need a current DaCHS beta package for that to work, though; we expect this stuff to go into our release packages around July.

    If any of the workshop participants read this: Thanks a lot for your patience with DaCHS' sometimes somewhat cryptic diagnostics. If, on the other hand, you missed the Graz workshop and have solar system data: Please talk to us or the kind and friendly Europlanet folks – either us will be delighted to support your publication project. And perhaps we'll meet you at the next such workshop, planned for 2018 in the Czech Republic.

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