No Arabic abstract
New tools are needed to handle the growth of data in astrophysics delivered by recent and upcoming surveys. We aim to build open-source, light, flexible, and interactive software designed to visualize extensive three-dimensional (3D) tabular data. Entirely written in the Python language, we have developed interactive tools to browse and visualize the positions of galaxies in the universe and their positions with respect to its large-scale structures (LSS). Motivated by a previous study, we created two codes using Mollweide projection and wedge diagram visualizations, where survey galaxies can be overplotted on the LSS of the universe. These are interactive representations where the visualizations can be controlled by widgets. We have released these open-source codes that have been designed to be easily re-used and customized by the scientific community to fulfill their needs. The codes are adaptable to other kinds of 3D tabular data and are robust enough to handle several millions of objects.
This article presents a newly developed Web portal called VisIVOWeb that aims to provide the astrophysical community with powerful visualization tools for large-scale data sets in the context of Web 2.0. VisIVOWeb can effectively handle modern numerical simulations and real-world observations. Our open-source software is based on established visualization toolkits offering high-quality rendering algorithms. The underlying data management is discussed with the supported visualization interfaces and movie-making functionality. We introduce VisIVOWeb Network, a robust network of customized Web portals for visual discovery, and VisIVOWeb Connect, a lightweight and efficient solution for seamlessly connecting to existing astrophysical archives. A significant effort has been devoted for ensuring interoperability with existing tools by adhering to IVOA standards. We conclude with a summary of our work and a discussion on future developments.
3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool, however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS - 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS - 26 GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our frameworks performance. The framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time < 0.3 second with 1024 x 1024 pixels output resolution using 3 rendering workstations and 8 GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.
Upcoming HI surveys will deliver large datasets, and automated processing using the full 3-D information (two positional dimensions and one spectral dimension) to find and characterize HI objects is imperative. In this context, visualization is an essential tool for enabling qualitative and quantitative human control on an automated source finding and analysis pipeline. We discuss how Visual Analytics, the combination of automated data processing and human reasoning, creativity and intuition, supported by interactive visualization, enables flexible and fast interaction with the 3-D data, helping the astronomer to deal with the analysis of complex sources. 3-D visualization, coupled to modeling, provides additional capabilities helping the discovery and analysis of subtle structures in the 3-D domain. The requirements for a fully interactive visualization tool are: coupled 1-D/2-D/3-D visualization, quantitative and comparative capabilities, combined with supervised semi-automated analysis. Moreover, the source code must have the following characteristics for enabling collaborative work: open, modular, well documented, and well maintained. We review four state of-the-art, 3-D visualization packages assessing their capabilities and feasibility for use in the case of 3-D astronomical data.
We study the dependence of the properties of group galaxies on the surrounding large-scale environment, using SDSS-DR7 data. Galaxies are ranked according to their luminosity within each group and classified morphologically by the Sersic index. We have considered samples of the host groups in superstructures of galaxies, and elsewhere. We find a significant dependence of the properties of late-type brightest group galaxies on the large-scale environment: they show statistically significant higher luminosities and stellar masses, redder u-r colours, lower star formation activity and longer star-formation time-scale when embedded in superstructures. By contrast, the properties of the early-type brightest group galaxies are remarkably similar regardless of the group global environment. The other group member galaxies exhibit only the local influence of the group they inhabit. Our analysis comprises tests against the dependence on the host group luminosity and we argue that group brightest member properties are not only determined by the host halo, but also by the large-scale structure which can influence the accretion process onto their late-type brightest galaxies.
We explore the properties of the large-scale environment of FR0 radio galaxies belonging to the FR0CAT sample which includes 104 compact radio sources associated with nearby (z<0.05) early-type galaxies. By using various estimators we find that FR0s live in regions of higher than the average galaxies density and a factor two lower density, on average, with respect to FRI radio galaxies. This latter difference is driven by the large fraction (63%) of FR0s located in groups formed by less than 15 galaxies, an environment which FRIs rarely (17%) inhabit. Beside the lack of substantial extended radio emission defining the FR0s class, this is the first significant difference between the properties of these two populations of low power radio galaxies. We interpret the differences in environment between FR0s and FRIs as the due to an evolutionary link between local galaxies density, BH spin, jet power, and extended radio emission.