Summary: UT Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein eyes Wrangler supercomputer for HETDEX extragalactic survey, in this interview with host Jorge Salazar. A million galaxies far, far away are predicted to be discovered before the year 2020 thanks to a monumental mapping of the night sky in search of a mysterious force. That's according to scientists working on HETDEX, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment. They're going to transform the big data from galaxy spectra billions of light-years away into meaningful discoveries with the help of the Wrangler data-intensive supercomputer. "You can imagine that would require an immense amount of computing storage and computing power. It was a natural match for us and TACC to be able to make use of these resources," Steven Finkelstein said. Finkelstein is an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). He's one of the lead scientists working on HETDEX. "HETDEX is one of the largest galaxy surveys that has ever been done," Finkelstein said. Starting in late 2016, thousands of new galaxies will be detected each night by the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. It'll study them using an instrument called VIRUS, the Visible Integral Field Replicable Unit Spectrograph. VIRUS takes starlight from distant galaxies and splits the light into its component colors like a prism does. Music Credits: Raro Bueno, Chuzausen freemusicarchive.org/music/Chuzausen/
