Julia in Astronomy & Astrophysics Research
A Mini-Symposium at JuliaCon 2022
Monday, July 25, 2022
Goals
This minisymposium aims to provide researchers in astronomy and astrophysicists an opportunity to share how Julia has enhanced their science and the challenges they encountered. We aim to identify shared needs (e.g., opportunities for new/upgraded packages) that could significantly accelerate the adoption of Julia among the astronomical research community. A secondary goal is to help strengthen the community of Julia developers active in astronomical research.
Schedule
- 14:00EDT Welcome
- 14:03EDT Using Julia to build the simulation pipeline of an astronomical instrument (Maurizio Tomasi, Università degli Studi di Milano) (pre-recorded)
- 14:20EDT Jointly Modeling Telluric Features and Stellar Variability with StellarSpectraObservationFitting.jl (Christian Gilbertson, Penn State) (pre-recorded)
- 14:35EDT Characterizing the TRAPPIST-1 system with Julia (Eric Agol, University of Washington)
- 14:50EDT Gradients of the Big Bang with Bolt.jl (Zack Li, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics / University of Toronto)
- 15:10EDT High-dimensional inference from the Cosmic Microwave Background on GPU (Marius Millea, University of California, Berkeley & Davis)
- 15:25EDT Adaptive Optics with Julia (William Thompson, University of Victoria)
- 15:40EDT Back to Basics in Analyzing Radio Astronomy Data (Paul Barrett, The George Washington University)
- 16:00EDT Panel Discussion moderated by Eric Ford (Penn State). Questions and some text responses avaliable via Pigeonhole.
Rationale
This mini-symposium aims to help accelerate the adoption of Julia among astronomers and astrophysicists. Astrophysicists have long been among the leaders in High-Performance Computing. Large astronomical surveys continue to create new opportunities for researchers with the skills and tools to harness Big Data efficiently. Early adopters of Julia have developed packages providing functionality commonly needed by the astronomical community (e.g., packages in the JuliaAstro organization) and/or gained experience applying Julia to their research problems. According to NASA’s Astrophysical Data System, over 30 papers in the astronomy & astrophysics literature include “Julia” and “Bezanson et al. (2017)”, with most of those being published since 2021. This mini-symposium invites researchers with experience applying Julia to astronomical research to share their experiences through a series of short talks and followed by a panel discussion.
Speakers are asked not to emphasize the astronomical methods or conclusions, but rather how using Julia impacted their project. How did Julia enhance their science or their productivity? What challenges related to Julia did they encounter? What work-arounds did they find? What additions or upgrades to the Julia package ecosystem would be helpful for their future projects? …or for accelerating adoption of Julia among the astronomical community? What resources did they use for integrating their research groups and/or collaborators into the Julia community? Where could filling a gap in documentation and or developing improved training materials be particularly impactful for helping astronomers to transition to Julia?