Commission project gives astronomers access to 'digital sky'
A European Commission-funded project, launched in November 2001, is opening up the 'digital sky' to astronomers by providing web access to vast databanks of astronomical information from the world's observatories. The Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) enables astronomers to 'put the Universe online' by seamlessly combining data from ground and space-based telescopes across the full range of wavelengths, from high-energy gamma rays to radio waves. The information provided by AVO will allow astronomers to make groundbreaking observations, pinpointing events such as supernovae and predicting possible asteroid threats to Earth. Astronomers have long struggled with the overwhelming amount of data accumulating in digital archives from observatories the world over. The growth rate is fast and hundreds of terabytes of data are already available to scientists. The AVO will allow astronomers to analyse the huge amount of information at their disposal. The European Commission is providing four million euro of funding for the three-year AVO project under the 'Access to research infrastructures' element of the Fifth Framework programme's 'Improving human potential' programme. AVO will provide software tools to allow astronomers to access the multi-wavelength data archives over the Internet, giving them the capability to resolve fundamental questions about the Universe. Equivalent searches of the 'real' sky would be both costly and time-consuming in comparison. The National Science Foundation in the USA is also funding its own National Virtual Observatory (NVO). The AVO project team has formed a close alliance with the NVO and both teams have representatives on their counterpart committees. The aim is to work towards the creation of a global virtual observatory. The AVO involves six partner organisations led by the European southern observatory (ESO) in Munich, Germany: ESA, the UK's ASTROGRID consortium, the Centre de données astronomiques at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, the TERAPIX astronomical data centre at the Institut d'astrophysique in Paris, France and Jodrell Bank Observatory of Manchester's Victoria University in the UK. In a separate development, the councils of the ESO and the UK's PPARC (particle physics and astronomy research council) have endorsed the terms for UK membership of the ESO. The formal accession procedure will now begin in the UK and accession is expected to take place in July 2002. ESO council President Dr Arno Freytag welcomed the development. 'This is a most important step in the continuing process of European integration,' he said, emphasising that 'the benefits will be mutual.' ESO is the main European organisation for astronomy, with two major observatories in the Chilean Atacama desert. The UK will become the ESO's tenth member state, following in the footsteps of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland.