Faced with a Data Deluge, Astronomers Turn to Automation

One astronomer had jumped the gun, tweeting ahead of an official announcement by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). The observatory had detected an outburst of gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime, and an orbiting gamma-ray telescope had simultaneously seen electromagnetic radiation emanating from the same region of space. The observations--which were traced back to a colliding pair of neutron stars 130 million light-years away--marked a pivotal moment for multimessenger astronomy, in which celestial events are studied using a wide range of wildly different telescopes and detectors. The promise of multimessenger astronomy is immense: by observing not only in light but also in gravitational waves and elusive particles called neutrinos, all at once, researchers can gain unprecedented views of the inner workings of exploding stars, galactic nuclei and other exotic phenomena. But the challenges are great, too: as observatories get bigger and more sensitive and monitor ever larger volumes of space, multimessenger astronomy could drown in a deluge of data, making it harder for telescopes to respond in real time to unfolding astrophysical events.