INVITED I101: ESASky: Unveiling the Universe through Multi-Wavelength and Time-Domain Exploration

Monday Plenary 1: Invited talk

When

9 to 9:30 a.m., Nov. 6, 2023

Where

Theme: Science with data archives: challenges in multi-wavelength and time domain data analysis

PRETALX

In the evolving landscape of astronomical research, a comprehensive understanding requires more than isolated observations across the electromagnetic spectrum. Today, the study of many astronomical phenomena demands an integrated approach, where multi-wavelength analysis converges with time-domain investigation. To facilitate such a holistic exploration, astronomical archives play an important role in providing access to multi-wavelength and time-domain data, enabling astronomers to study their objects of interest effectively. However, navigating multiple archives can be time-consuming and cumbersome.

ESASky (https://sky.esa.int) is a science-driven discovery portal with the primary goal of facilitating data discovery and archival science of multi-mission, multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astronomical data. ESASky provides full access to the entire sky as observed by ESA space astronomy missions, missions from international partners such as Chandra (NASA), Suzaku (JAXA) and AKARI (JAXA), and ground-based and space-based observatories from the major astronomical data centres of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Canadian Astronomy Data Center (CADC), the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). Users can search, visualise and download all public high-quality data from these observatories, including science-ready images, spectra, catalogues, data cubes and time series data, as well as search for publications associated with sources and plan JWST observations. Additionally, the multi-messenger feature of ESASky provides access to gravitational wave events and probability maps on the sky from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration and Neutrino events from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. 

Exciting new features have been added to ESASky this year to provide users with access to even more astronomical data. These include the ability to access all tables in the VizieR Catalogue Service from the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre (CDS) and access to all data centres registered in the Virtual Observatory (VO) Table Access Protocol (TAP) Registry. Notably, these new data centres encompass VizieR, NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) Data Centre, the Javalambre-Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS) and all tables within the ESA Archives (Gaia, XMM-Newton, JWST, HST, Herschel, ISO, INTEGRAL, and Legacy archives such as Hipparcos, Cos-B and CoRoT). 

In this presentation, I’ll highlight the numerous multi-wavelength features of ESASky and discuss the current and new developments aimed at incorporating time-domain data, ultimately evolving ESASky into a fully-featured multi-wavelength and time-domain exploration tool.

Contacts

Deborah Baines, Quasar Science Resources for ESA