Who Runs The World: Data

Abstract

Space telescopes have increased the quality of data collection for today’s astronomy. In parallel to this, obtaining high-quality data with high technology and good resolution focal plane detectors in accordance with the developments in material science in the ground-based observations has been achieved. With the new generation of ground-based and space observations, global campaigns also brought continuity in data acquisition and increased performance. Finally, the fact that theoretical outputs can be made to allow in today’s technology, for example, the detection of gravitational waves in the universe and these add new ones to the existing data. In addition, there has been a significant increase in data archiving, reduction, and processing together with the number and variety of data collection tools. Astronomers have been able to overcome the facilitation in these processes in their own way: manpower waste has been reduced with autonomous telescopes, the data has been transformed into informatics (astroinformatics) with pipelines, the workload has been reduced to large masses by establishing a virtual observatory, and finally, smart applications have been opened with the provided big data and new open areas have been reached with a future such as data mining. In this way, there has been progressing in solving many astronomical events in the universe. This chapter is organized in two subsections. In first, we are discussing how to solve problems in astronomy by using big data. In the second, we mention big data sources in astronomy. The importance of data in astronomy, sources of data, big data in regards to the discovery of the universe, and analyzing data are the topics discussed in these subsections.