From Data to Discovery: Mining Hidden Insights from Astronomical Surveys

Speaker: Sihao Cheng (IAS) In Person and zoom

Zoom Recording Passcode: ?@TE0?Lp

Astronomical surveys hold immense discovery potential, but unlocking their secrets often requires deliberate and creative "mining". I will discuss strategies to extract hidden insights from data. First, I will present my discovery of buoyant "icebergs" in white dwarf stars, which is enabled by a novel data analysis with guidance from physics. Through plasma distillation, these icebergs can power the stellar remnants for ten billion years without cooling down. Next, I will discuss the frontier of decoding complex datasets in cosmology and astrophysics, with new techniques that achieve neural-net performance while preserving traditional methods' interpretability. These cases highlight a critical lesson: discovery is not only driven by new data, but also by innovative ideas that transcend disciplinary boundaries. I will conclude with how these strategies can be applied to next-generation sky surveys to open new discovery spaces.