Automatic and semi-automatic methods for the detection of quasars in sky surveys

Abstract

With the advances of the technologies for the sky surveys, massive amount of survey data become available. It would be very helpful for the automatic and semi-automatic methods in the classifications/detections of the astrophysical objects. In fact, for surveys of millions of objects, it may not be possible to detect the desired objects by expert inspection alone. Quasars are interesting astrophysical objects that have been recently discovered more comprehensively from the sky surveys. Automatic and semi-automatic methods have been proposed for the detection of the quasars from the massive data produced by the modern sky surveys. In this chapter, the first section describes about the existing automatic and semi-automatic methods for the comprehensive search of quasars. Secondly, it will be explored to see if some machine learning algorithms can automatically classify the light curves of the quasars against the very similar light curves of the other stars. For example in MACHO sky survey, the light curves of the Be stars are so similar with the quasar light curves that the previous algorithms and even the manual examination by experts cannot tell the difference between the light. Experimental results will also be shown for this exploratory work. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.