To the farthest reaches in five years

The Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) has had a successful partnership with NCSA, and this year marks a special milestone. 2024 is the fifth year that CAPS has been in operation – the perfect time to reflect on all the successes, achievements and contributions to the field its initiatives have accomplished over the past five years.

Created in 2019, CAPS provides the intellectual leadership and resources to catalyze, coordinate and propel research in the astrophysical sciences on Campus. CAPS leverages expertise from NCSA and connects it to expertise across the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (U. of I.) Campus, to facilitate research that literally looks out at the entire Universe. CAPS also provided vital services, such as training, workshops and engagement opportunities, to help researchers develop their work into large-scale projects. CAPS’s forward-looking approach enables groundbreaking research and new approaches to studying the cosmos. The following are just a few highlights of the Center’s important contributions to science, the field of astrophysics and beyond.

Center for AstroPhysical Surveys

CAPS  is housed within the Astrophysical Survey Program Office (ASPO) at NCSA. The main goal of CAPS, one that will continue to pay dividends to the broad field of astrophysics in years to come, is to create fertile ground for future researchers to develop and run large-scale astrophysical survey projects. In order to train the next generation of researchers, each year CAPS awards postdoctoral and graduate fellowships to promising researchers in astrophysics. These researchers are given access to NCSA supercomputing resources and computing experts for their research projects. As they matriculate through the program, CAPS fellows will become the backbone of future research in astrophysics, their valuable experience at the Center allowing them to move forward in their careers in leaps and bounds.

Whether it’s discovering complex organic molecules in distant galaxies, using machine learning to analyze supernovae, or traveling to the South Pole to observe the beginning of the universe, CAPS graduate student fellows like Melanie Archipley have found success both within and beyond the program.

“CAPS supported me through my thesis project,” said Archipley, “which used the South Pole Telescope (SPT) to discover tens of thousands of galaxies, many of which are incredibly distant objects in our universe. The outcome of this work, a catalog of objects, has been used in SPT publications with topics ranging from cosmology, galaxy clusters, and transient events. We have also submitted telescope proposals to observe some of these objects with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to learn about the galaxies’ compositions, morphologies, and kinematics. Finally, I actually got to visit the South Pole!”

Former CAPS fellows, like Alex Gagliano, have taken their experience at NCSA and run with it. Gagliano finished his graduate program last year and ended up at Cambridge, MA, where he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship that’s jointly affiliated with Harvard, MIT, Northeastern and Tufts. As a member of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI), he’s investigating how to combine physics constraints with new machine-learning models.

I’m just immensely grateful at how strong the community is at U of I. I feel like I’ve had the flexibility to do research that I’m incredibly excited about and be supported along the way. 

–Alex Gagliano, former NCSA/CAPS graduate research fellow

“I wanted to find an academic home that sat right at that intersection between computation and astrophysics,” said Gagliano. “I was enthusiastic about NCSA for just how excited other people in the department were about being able to develop tools that were new in the realm of computer science. They were thinking about using those tools for really rigorous physical insight.”

Major Surveys and Projects

ASPO and CAPS have supported a number of large research projects over the past five years. Here are highlights of the three biggest projects they’ve tackled.

The Cosmic Microwave Background

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang. By studying the CMB, researchers are able to explore the history of the cosmos, all the way back to its very first instances 14 billion years ago.

Members of ASPO and CAPS work on the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the largest telescope on the planet dedicated to observations of the CMB. In addition to using the SPT to study the evolution of the universe, CAPS has been leading analyses on observing how the millimeter-wave sky changes over time, a new sub-field of astrophysics. U. of I. researchers work closely with their collaborators at the University of Chicago, Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratories on this project, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Polar Programs (OPP), and the Department of Energy (DOE).

Planning into the next decade, a huge team of researchers, including members of ASPO, have been designing a suite of telescopes to make the most precise measurements of the CMB ever. This experiment, called CMB Stage 4 (CMB-S4), will enable new discoveries and insights into the origin of the Universe, as well as a broad range of astrophysics and fundamental physics. The CMB-S4 effort at the U. of I. is supported by the NSF and DOE.

“We are very excited for the CMB-S4 project at NCSA. In addition to observing the oldest light in the universe, we will also measure how the sky changes at millimeter wavelengths,” says Dr. Felipe Menanteau, senior research scientist and NCSA affiliate. “Opening the millimeter transient sky will allow us to observe our galaxy and the universe in a totally new way and it’s exciting to anticipate what new things we might learn.” 

Large scale surveys of the sky at optical wavelengths

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a U.S.-led international project that has mapped large portions of the sky at optical wavelengths, surveying everything from galaxies to supernovae. The main goal of the project is to better understand dark energy and why it seems to accelerate cosmic expansion. In the first six years of operation, the DES recorded information about 550 million galaxies, giving researchers an unprecedented amount of data to study. NCSA, along with Fermilab and NOIRLab, is a founding partner of the DES project. The DES project is funded by the NSF and DOE.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a state-of-the-art astronomical survey facility nearing completion on Cerro Pachón in Chile. Under construction for the past decade, NCSA played a crucial role in the design and construction of the project, with involvement going back more than 20 years. The Rubin Observatory, which is jointly funded by the NSF and DOE through a Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) award of more than half a billion dollars, is comprised of a powerful 8.4-meter telescope and a 3.2 gigapixel camera – the largest camera ever built.  The Rubin Observatory will take images that cover an area of 40 full moons on the sky and generate 20 petabytes of data every night.

For the next 10 years, the Rubin Observatory will conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) which will effectively make a movie of the night sky. This will allow astronomers to discover anything on sky changes, such as exploding stars, potentially dangerous asteroids or distant supermassive black holes consuming gas. With this transformative capability, the survey will catalog billions of new galaxies and stars, better measure the expansion of the universe, map the distribution of dark matter and make new, unimagined discoveries. The Rubin Observatory, with first light anticipated in 2025, is poised to revolutionize how humans observe the night sky.

”One of the key developments in astrophysics in the last decade has been uncovering the gravitational wave universe,” said Prof. Gautham Narayan, CAPS deputy director. “That has enabled the discovery of extraordinarily rare events such as the mergers of two neutron stars by looking for the distortions they cause in space-time.”

Occasionally, such events will have detectable electromagnetic counterparts or emit high-energy particles. Detecting these “multi-messenger” events requires coordination and sharing information using a common, machine-readable standard in real-time between scientists spread across the world in the minutes to days after the event is first detected. This is the mission of the Scalable Cyber Infrastructure for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (SCIMMA) team, led by Narayan at NCSA, and involving researchers and software developers at Las Cumbres Observatory; NSF’s NOIRLab; Pennsylvania State University; Cornell University; University of California, Santa Barbara; Michigan State University and the University of Hawaii.

Funded by two multi-million dollar grants from the National Science Foundation, SCIMMA is developing tools and services to advance multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics by creating a cohesive ecosystem around ground and space-based facilities and experiments. This will revolutionize how astrophysics is carried out over the coming decades. 

Outreach, Training, Conferences & Events

Every year, CAPS hosts and supports a number of events. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is essential to astrophysical research, and CAPS continues to support such efforts through conferences such as COSMO21, the Transient & Variable Universe, CMB-S4 Astrophysics, AstroFest, Line Intensity Mapping and IAUS385, events that demonstrate the breadth of disciplines involved in astronomical research. Though these events and conferences are aimed at researchers, CAPS also recognizes the importance of educating the community.

Outreach efforts like the Girls’ Astronomy Summer Camp and the I-Sci Explorers showcase CAPS’s commitment to inspiring the next generation of scientists. The multi-day camp is designed for high school students and allows them the opportunity to work on hands-on astronomy projects, including hosting a private planetarium show and working with U. of I. astrophysicists. For the past three years, CAPS has worked closely with camp organizers to build and operate cyberinfrastructure, including the public website, email list and a JupyterHub service that the campers use to learn astronomy-focused, Python-based programming techniques during a live tutorial session.

CAPS also regularly hosts seminars by international experts in the field of astrophysical surveys. These research seminars are open to the public and cover a wide range of topics – cosmological theory, state-of-the-art instrumentation, data science techniques and data visualization. This successful series offers a way for CAPS researchers to learn and collaborate with external researchers as well as provide a space for CAPS researchers to showcase their work and discoveries locally.

Year Five and Beyond

No overview of the past is complete without a look to the future. With the success of events like AstroFest and the Line Intensity Mapping 2024 (LIM) meeting, CAPS and ASPO will continue to grow and flourish in the coming years. The CAPS program, in particular, has raised its profile tremendously over the last five years. More students than ever are applying for fellowships and attending the sponsored conferences. As graduates from these programs go on to their professional careers, the plan is that they become a network of highly informed and connected astrophysics researchers who will continue to champion CAPS and draw even more diverse applicants to the program.

One of CAPS’s main goals is to prepare students for their future careers. Whether their paths lead them to academics or working for an organization like NASA, the Astrophysical Sciences Program Office wants to give these future astronomers and researchers the tools they need for continued success. If the first five years is any indication, that goal is quickly becoming reality.

What’s next? 

CAPS is involved in the Terahertz Intensity Mapper (TIM) – a NASA-funded mission to fly a two-meter-diameter mirror on a balloon around Antarctica to construct three-dimensional maps of the universe to understand how the cosmic star formation rate evolves over time. TIM, led by Illinois Professor and CAPS director Joaquin Vieira, was constructed with an original five-year NASA award and was recently renewed for another five years to fly.

CAPS is also involved in a new NSF- and Simons Foundation-funded artificial intelligence center called SkAI. SkAI is a collaboration between the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago KICP, U. of I. and NCSA/CAPS. The next decade of astronomical surveys promises transformational advances in astrophysics and cosmology. Groundbreaking discoveries will span the entire field of astronomy, from stars and black holes to galaxies, the largest cosmic structures, and the earliest moments of the universe. “To fulfill this promise, we must overcome significant challenges: analyzing vast, heterogeneous datasets; developing physically accurate simulations across a wide range of scales; and designing increasingly complex astronomical instruments and surveys,” said Vieira. “Addressing these challenges will require leveraging the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.”

CAPS is a key member of the SkAI Institute, an inclusive, cross-disciplinary nexus that will accelerate Astro-AI research. You can read more about SkAI here: SkAI Launched to Further Explore Universe

Contributor Acknowledgement
NCSA’s Joaquin Vieira, director of CAPS, and Gautham Narayan, deputy director of CAPS,  contributed to this story.

ABOUT ASPO/CAPS

NCSA’s Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) brings cohesion and advancement to astrophysical survey science efforts across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. CAPS offers annual postdoctoral and graduate fellowship programs, publishes vast amounts of astronomical data from a broad portfolio of astrophysical surveys and collaborates across disciplines to enable trailblazing research.