Science Discovery With Diverse Multi-Wavelength Datasets Fused in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED)

Abstract

Data from space-based observatories, large sky surveys, and the astrophysics literature are growing at an unprecedented rate. The ongoing expansion in volume, velocity and variety of astronomical data is creating exciting opportunities for making ground-breaking discoveries from interconnected archives and databases. I discuss how recent advances in joining data across the spectrum from NASA's GALEX, 2MASS and AllWISE sky surveys with over 118,000 other unique catalogs and journal articles, combined with new capabilities of the user interface, are helping astronomers make discoveries directly from information fused in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). After a review of recent scientific results that were enabled or facilitated by NED, I briefly consider some challenges and limitations in joining heterogeneous datasets, and conclude with a reminder of the importance of state of the art astronomical archives in expanding the opportunities for new science discoveries from multi-wavelength big data in the 2020s. NED is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with NASA.