CDS&E: A Cosmic Demographics Toolkit

NSF Award Search · 01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT · $556,256 · view on nsf.gov ↗

Abstract

The astronomical community devotes significant resources to ground-based and space-based astronomical surveys—systematic explorations of vast regions of space and time. The resulting catalogs provide “family portraits” of diverse cosmic populations, including asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects in the solar system, nearby stars and their exoplanets, distant galaxies and active galactic nuclei, and transient objects such as gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts, or supernovae. A research group at Cornell University will construct a “Cosmic Demographics Toolkit” (CDT), a widely applicable suite of conventional and modern computational tools accessible and appealing to the broad community of astronomers analyzing survey data. The project includes astrostatistics research producing methods with new capabilities, and development of software tools in an open-source, well-documented Python package. The resulting toolkit will help astronomers extract the best results from astronomical surveys. The researchers and their students will contribute to the training of the next generation of astronomers and computational scientists by participating in the Summer Schools on Statistics for Astronomy and Physics hosted by Penn State’s Center for Astrostatistics (CASt) and by producing videos communicating key aspects of advanced data analysis to the broader public. The CDT will include several demonstration applications, addressing important prototypical demographics problems such as estima

Key facts

NSF award ID
2510804
Awardee
Cornell University (NY)
SAM.gov UEI
G56PUALJ3KT5
PI
Thomas J Loredo
Primary program
01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
All programs
THEORETICAL & COMPUTATIONAL ASTROPHYSICS, CDS&E
Estimated total
$556,256
Funds obligated
$556,256
Transaction type
Standard Grant
Period
08/15/2025 → 07/31/2028