NVO Frequently Asked Questions

Click on one of the question links below to go to the answer to that question.

1) What is the NVO?
2) Why do astronomers need the NVO?
3) What new discoveries will come from the NVO?
4) How will the NVO benefit other branches of science?
5) Where is the NVO located?
6) How will the NVO benefit the general public?
7) How will we know when the NVO is a success?
8) How can I get data through the NVO?

1) What is the NVO?

The NVO is an effort to make all the astronomy data in the world easy to access, using a simple set of web interfaces. The NVO does not collect any data of its own; instead, it provides the resources to let users search and analyze data that already exists. For more information, see the What is NVO? section.

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2) Why do astronomers need the NVO?

As astronomers build more telescopes, the amount of data they collect increases exponentially. Astronomers are carefully studying each piece of data they collect, but data are most useful when studied along with other, related data. Today, so much data is being collected that astronomers cannot see or understand everyone else's data as well as their own. The NVO will let astronomers easily search for data, from all instruments at all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, that will help them understand the universe.

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3) What new discoveries will come from the NVO?

First, the NVO will allow scientists to compare huge amounts of data from all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma rays. Comparing these separate datasets will allow astronomers to systematically compare what sky objects look like in various wavelengths, leading to a more complete understanding of the universe. Such multiwavelength studies will help astronomers understand the distribution of stars in our galaxy, how and why stars and galaxies change with time, and the large-scale structure of the universe.

Second, some types of sky objects are so rare and unusual that astronomers haven't seen enough examples to understand them. With the search tools that the NVO will offer, astronomers will be able to quickly sort through huge amounts of data, finding the most unusual objects quickly. And since the NVO offers access to so much data, there will be more such objects to find. New NVO search tools have already found several new brown dwarfs, and will likely find more rare objects, such as faint quasars and gamma-ray bursts.

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4) How will the NVO benefit other branches of science?

Many other areas of science are running into the same problems as astronomy - these sciences are discovering so much data that individual scientists cannot be aware of all the other data in their field. Biologists have found the entire genetic sequences of organisms, oceanographers have measured data from ocean tracking stations all over the world, and particle physicists have conducted millions of experiments in particle accelerators. All these sciences need ways to organize and understand huge sets of data, and the tools of the NVO can provide models for these other projects.

In addition, computer science can benefit from the NVO. Computer scientists are interested in developing new theories and methods for understanding data. Astronomy data makes a good resource for testing these methods, because astronomy data is freely available, complex, and numerous. So the NVO will benefit many other sciences besides astronomy.

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5) Where is the NVO located?

The NVO does not to bring data together to a single location. Rather, the NVO provides tools for accessing and searching existing data. The data remain where they are, on data servers all over the United States. The astronomers and computer programmers developing the NVO are equally spread around the country. So the NVO can't be said to have any central location at all - its effort is distributed around the country, as only an Internet-based project can be.

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6) How will the NVO benefit the general public?

All the data organized by the NVO, and all of NVO's tools, are available to the general public. This means you can do astronomy research just as well as professional astronomers, using exactly the same tools! By making this high-quality data available to the public, the NVO will help show that the universe can be studied in all wavelengths of light, and that comparing different wavelengths leads to a much richer understanding of the universe.

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7) How will we know that the NVO is a success?

The measure of the NVO's success is its usefulness to astronomers and to the public. A successful NVO will see its tools used regularly by astronomers, meaning that research projects that used to take months can be finished in hours. It will also be used regularly by the public to get the latest astronomy data, everywhere in the sky and at all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. A successful NVO will be used so often that it will be taken for granted, just like successful web search engines today.

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8) How can I get data through the NVO?

The NVO's education and outreach plan is to work with existing outreach efforts, helping improve their products by providing them with up-to-date astronomy data from all over the sky. This site is a gateway to the outreach projects that use NVO-supplied data.

Click one of the tabs at the top of the page to learn more about how the NVO's education and outreach efforts can help you. The link will take you to a page that lists the NVO's outreach partners. Click on any of the links to go to the partners' web sites (the links will open in a new window). In those sites, you can learn about what the partner projects are doing, and how they will use NVO-supplied data to teach astronomy.

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