Special Issue on Astrostatistics

摘要

Like most areas of science, astronomy has benefited from a tremendous increase in the amount of available data gathered in recent decades, from both ground- and space-based instruments. For example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) commenced in 2000, at a time when studies were typically conducted with galaxy samples of sizes on the order of 1,000. By 2008, SDSS had produced a map of 930,000 galaxies, with high-resolution spectral information for each. By the time of its 15th data release in 2017, SDSS had a catalog of more than 2.5 million galaxies. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction in Chile, is projected to yield a catalog of 10~(10) galaxies by the time its 10-year survey ends in 2032.