The Rise of Astrophysical Transients
Michael Tucker, University of Hawaii
The dawn of the digital era has completely revolutionized how humans observe the night sky. Gone are the days when obtaining and analyzing a single image took many hours of human-intensive labor. Instead, computers have automated the majority of the tedious data processing tasks. I will provide a brief overview of how observational astronomers leverage high-performance computing in our search for weird and interesting events occurring throughout the Universe. Then, I will highlight some particularly unique discoveries I have led over the past few years as we survey the night sky at higher cadence and depth. Finally, I will look to the (not-so-distant) future as we prepare for the next generation of sky surveys to come online.
Abstract Author(s): Michael A. Tucker