Lactea: Web-Based Spectrum-Preserving Multi-Resolution Visualization of the GAIA Star Catalog

Abstract

The explosion of data in astronomy has resulted in an era of unprecedented opportunities for discovery. The GAIA mission's catalog, containing a large number of light sources (mostly stars) with several parameters such as sky position and proper motion, is playing a significant role in advancing astronomy research and has been crucial in various scientific breakthroughs over the past decade. In its current release, more than 200 million stars contain a calibrated continuous spectrum, which is essential for characterizing astronomical information such as effective temperature and surface gravity, and enabling complex tasks like interstellar extinction detection and narrow-band filtering. Even though numerous studies have been conducted to visualize and analyze the data in the SciVis and AstroVis communities, no work has attempted to leverage spectral information for visualization in real-time. Interactive exploration of such complex, massive data presents several challenges for visualization. This paper introduces a novel multi-resolution, spectrum-preserving data structure and a progressive, real-time visualization algorithm to handle the sheer volume of the data efficiently, enabling interactive visualization and exploration of the whole catalog's spectra. We show the efficiency of our method with our open-source, interactive, web-based tool for exploring the GAIA catalog, and discuss astronomically relevant use cases of our system.