Exhibit Visualizes Kepler Big Data

One of the challenges of big data has to do with making the huge amounts of information accessible so that people can comprehend it. The Imperial College of London has taken this challenge on using data gathered from the Kepler Space Observatory. The project, called “Starlight” launches this week as part of the 2013 London Design Festival.

The Kepler space observatory was launched by NASA in March 2009, named after astronomer Johannes Kepler. The goal of the space observatory is to collect data on the billions of stars in the galaxy and discover how many Earth-like planets are out there orbiting other stars. Kepler, basically a Schmidt telescope with a 0.95-meter aperture and a 105 square degree field-of-view, has been pointing at one specific group of more than 150,000 stars since its launch. That’s a tremendous amount of data, and one group has launched an exhibit aimed at representing it.

The exhibit, “Starlight,” has been created by Imperial alumni, Dr. John Rogers. According to a recent report out of Imperial, the exhibit is an installation made up of 12 colored lights – each controlled by a different stream of data. The data streams have been sped up to more than 1,000 times their original speed so that people can see the lights flicker on a faster time scale. As these lights from the actual Kepler data flicker and pulse, people are able to get a sense of the movement happening in space, such as a planet moving across the face of a star.

Rogers says that the light level from each of the lamps is a representation of how the Kepler telescope could see light from the far off star. “We have picked stars with transiting planets which cause the light to dim each time a planet passes in front of it,” he said. “We want to give people a physical representation of the story of the exploration of space through light. We think it’s really important that complex problems in science are made more tangible and accessible in ordinary formats.”

“You only need to imagine our own solar system to understand why the dimming of a light bulb relates to the discovery of a planet”, Dr. Rogers explains. “For example, if a telescope from a far-away planet were pointed at our Sun to collect a stream of data about it, every time a planet in our solar system passed in front of the Sun, the data stream would change.”

To date, NASA says that the Kepler observatory has discovered 151 confirmed planets, 3,548 planet candidates, and 2,165 eclipsing binary stars.

The London Design Festival starts this week and will run for nine days, ending on September 22. 

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