I developed the Astro-WISE (www.astro-wise.org) dependency-based data model that supports scientific use-cases for the detecting and analysing Quasi-stellar objects. Quasi-stellar objects (QSOs or quasars) are the active cores of distant galaxies and belong to the most distant objects that can be detected. Galaxies with a massive black hole in their center can have phases of extreme activity in their nuclei due to accretion of mass. Quasars can be brighter than the galaxy that hosts them and can be detected beyond a redshift of 7. Detecting quasars at high redshift probes the Universe at an early age. Quasars can be used to study reionization cosmological structure growth and the formation of super massive black holes. Finding more high redshift quasars is therefore important to understand the early Universe and how it evolves.
QSO’s are unresolved due to their small size and long distance. Therefore, they are point sources and cannot be distinguished from stars by their shape. The ultimate way to disentangle quasars from stars is through spectroscopy, which can only be taken for a limited set of sources. The colour properties of quasars and stars are very different and can therefore be used to perform a rough selection to prepare a sample for follow-up spectroscopic observations. That side, I developed a data model that accommodates external data and provides the necessary processing, comparison and checking with these external data. I was then able to discover the first high-red shift quasars high redshift quasars at redshift >6.5
This is Artificial intelligence process, which involves building instruments calibrating models, and image analysis. I also developed a class-based object versioning framework that supports dynamic changes to pipelines while managing dependencies. The framework addresses the management of arbitrary changes made to scripts during a data row and the association of these changes to data created. This is mainly very important to research and/or scientist as they do, they experiment, most often, they have several results without knowledge of which modification in the scripts produced the results or artifact.