Quasars, light sources powered by black holes, are amongst the brightest objects in the universe, and are used as searchlights to illuminate the contents of the universe between earth and the quasar. Historically features in these quasars were detected by visually inspecting the spectra! However, astronomers now have surveys containing 10^5 quasars, which makes this infeasible. I will describe a Gaussian Process based pipeline we designed to automate this, which involves learning a large matrix-based kernel function.

Prof. Simeon Bird