A SOFTWARE agent that can automatically assume control of some of the world鈥檚 most powerful telescopes and quickly train them on the most violent events in the universe has passed its first test.
Astronomers need to react fast if they want to study rapidly changing events, such as a supernova collapsing under its own gravity. To build up a good picture of the event, they want images from telescopes working at different electromagnetic wavelengths and in different parts of the world. But rapid coordination can be difficult, particularly when many telescopes are already busy.
So astronomers at the University of Exeter, Liverpool John Moores University and the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii have turned to intelligent software agents to see if they can corral the world鈥檚 telescopes into reacting much faster to unpredictable stellar events.
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Software agents are an emerging class of program capable of performing in unpredictable environments. Some are already at work on the web, for instance, automatically buying products when the price is right, says software engineer Michael Luck at the University of Southampton, UK.
But instead of prices, the astronomy agent eStar looks for oddities in images of star fields. If a star is brighter than normal, say, it contacts other telescopes over the internet and asks them to image that area in certain wavelengths, says Exeter astronomer Tim Naylor.
Like the buying agents, eStar makes a contract with the remote telescope, effectively buying time on it, he says. But it does so with unprecedented speed, at any time of the day or night and regardless of whether the instrument is manned or not. The agent is designed to take full control of robotic telescopes, and to add a job to the queue of others.
In a test run last month, an eStar agent negotiated with the 3.8-metre United Kingdom Infrared Telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaii, to compare live images with a database of existing star maps. Naylor says an image processing module built into the agent successfully detected SS Cygni, a dwarf star whose brightness is known to vary. Had the variation been indicative of say, a supernova or a near-Earth asteroid, the agent could then have sought further images 鈥� and alerted astronomers by email or text message.
The eStar team hopes to roll out the software to other telescopes, including the James Clerk Maxwell telescope on Hawaii and the European Space Agency鈥檚 Integral space observatory.
