Almost a century after Albert Einstein first theorised them, the universe’s gravitational waves were observed for the first time in 2015. Much remains to be discovered about the universe and multi-messenger astrophysics can help. For a long time, astronomy could only study the cosmos through light, first by gazing at the night sky, via telescopes and ultimately via all energies of light in the electromagnetic spectrum. The new frontier of astrophysics is to transcend light via so-called multi-messenger astronomy. This branch of science tracks high-energy particles hitting earth, particles whizzing through spaces and ripples in the fabric of space and time to shed light on some of the most extreme events in the universe. It could, for instance, answer questions about “extreme matter” – matter exposed to extreme conditions that are not encountered on earth, such as intense radiation, high pressure, low temperatures, or very strong magnetic fields. It could also help us to better understand another aspect of Einstein’s relativity theory by examining how particles behave in spacetime that becomes distorted by the presence of massive bodies.
This project wants to support this new frontier in science through data services. It will link up astronomy and e-infrastructures, focusing on data organisation, the orchestration of time- and space-dependent metadata and innovative artificial intelligence services. At present much astrophysical data remains fragmented. That is why this project will focus on organising data from different wavelengths or messengers and different types of extreme astrophysical transients so that they can be easily gathered, analysed and modelled holistically. Considering the huge amount of data that some of the world-class research infrastructures produce, it will also be necessary to introduce new paradigms for data analysis.
The ambitions of this project are four-fold:
- leveraging EOSC to remove sociological barriers among different communities, exploiting synergies and complementarities across different communities that together count some potential ten thousand researchers in Europe for frontier results;
- creating a unique link between research infrastructures’ data, the fundamental science question of understanding the origin of the most violent phenomena in the universe and the computational-cloud tools needed to answer it;
- building through EOSC Future the transversal environment to provide frontier AI, analysis methods and a cloud-based analysis dashboard that allows users to exploit the e-infrastructure services;
- bringing the European research community at the leading edge of multi-messengers’ modern astrophysics in an international context and driving the global synergies by promoting the EOSC concept implementation.