T-ERC - Tremplin-ERC

Reconstructing the life of massive galaxies through artificial intelligence in the big-data era – ASTROBRAIN

Submission summary

Understanding how galaxies form and evolve is an unavoidable step for humanity in quest for its origins. Galaxies in the past were small, dense and irregular. Today they conform the well known Hubble sequence. Linking the two populations is the key and the founding driver of this proposal.
We have a unique opportunity to make this definitive step forward and conclusively reconstruct the life of a typical (super) Milky-Way galaxy. Astronomy is indeed entering the big data era. The assembly histories of billions of galaxies are encoded in extra-large surveys. Extracting and interpreting this information is a new challenge with no valid solution yet. Currently, the power of these datasets to establish causality links between objects is under exploited given the degeneracy between common observables and physical processes. ASTROBRAIN emerges from the evidence that new techniques need to be invented now to benefit from this big-data transition and improve our knowledge of galaxy formation. I ask support to build a unique team worldwide that will bring together astronomers and computer vision experts. Using the deepest current (and future) photo-spectroscopic datasets with the most up-to-date numerical simulations, my team will develop new methods based on advanced machine intelligence to trace back the mass assembly and star formation histories in massive samples of galaxies from their stellar light/mass distributions (interactions, feedback, instabilities etc) and link them to dark-matter. We will that way deeply change the way observables and physics are related in surveys and provide a comprehensive view of how massive galaxies evolve over 80% of the cosmic time. All developed tools will be released as a legacy product to ensure its impact in our community.
I am in an excellent position to lead this step forward. I am currently involved in most current and future large surveys and have always pioneered the use of new advanced intelligent techniques in astronomy.

Project coordination

Marc HUERTAS-COMPANY (Marc Huertas-Company)

The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.

Partner

LERMA Marc Huertas-Company

Help of the ANR 149,580 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project: December 2016 - 18 Months

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