Briefs

Space.com reports that astronomy's next great discovery may be found
not by telescope, but instead with little more than a laptop computer,
an Internet connection and a learned and persistent amateur. In fact,
astronomers are already pulling new findings from old data, the start
of what some say is a looming change in how science gets done.

Called virtual astronomy, the research technique is a break from using
telescopes and other instruments for direct observational data
gathering.

Instead, scientists will pore over a mounting bounty of new and old
data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern
Observatory and others telescopes.

"We�ve become so advanced [technologically] that we�re now
dealing with a data avalanche from our observations," said Joseph
C. Jacob, who works on the Digital Sky Project, a joint venture by the
California Institute of Technology and NASA�s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory to connect four astronomical databases through one Internet
web portal.

The amount of dusty data is remarkable.

Hubble alone collects about a terabyte of information each year,
roughly the equivalent about 231 million pages of typed text. Some
telescopes under development are expected to pump out that much data
in a day. And in most cases, researchers said, far more data is
collected than needed at the time. The observations are later
revisited by different scientists, sometimes up to two or three times,
for use in new studies.

Current efforts to mine the archives are mostly manual and require
that each research group adjust the data to fit their format, said
Robert Hanisch, a senior scientist at the Space Telescope Science
Institute, which manages Hubble.

Discoveries already

In August, European scientists announced that their use of Astrovirtel
led to a readjustment in the size of the space rock 2001 KX76, a
distant object located outside the orbit of Pluto in a region known as
the Kuiper Belt. The use of virtual astronomy, researchers said,
allowed investigators to study the rock's orbit over a longer period
of time, and calculate a new diameter of 745 miles (1,200 km) or more.

For more information, see www.space.com