Astroinformatics and Big Data in Astronomy

A special issue of Universe (ISSN 2218-1997). This special issue belongs to the section "Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 1281

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
School of Science, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Interests: astrophysics; astrostatistics; big data

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The explosive growth of astronomical data generated by modern sky surveys, advanced telescopes, and large-scale simulations has propelled astronomy into the era of big data. Effectively managing, processing, and extracting actionable scientific insights from these massive, complex datasets stands as one of the most critical and transformative challenges in contemporary astrophysics. Astroinformatics—an emerging interdisciplinary field at the nexus of astronomy, computer science, and data science—plays an indispensable role in addressing this challenge by developing innovative methodologies, computational frameworks, and analytical tools tailored to the unique demands of astronomical research.

This Special Issue, titled “Astroinformatics and Big Data in Astronomy,” seeks to showcase cutting-edge research that bridges data science and astronomy. We warmly encourage submissions leveraging state-of-the-art techniques in machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), statistical inference, data mining, interactive data visualization, and high-performance computing to tackle pressing problems across all subfields of astronomy. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Automated end-to-end data processing pipelines;
  • Intelligent celestial object classification and novel discovery systems;
  • Scalable data storage, management, and analytics architectures;
  • Simulation-based inference and surrogate modeling;
  • Virtual observatories and integrated data access platforms;
  • Interpretable AI/ML for astronomical insight and hypothesis generation;
  • Statistical and computational methods for handling noise, uncertainty, and incompleteness in astronomical data.

We invite astronomers, data scientists, computer scientists, and researchers from related disciplines to contribute original research articles and comprehensive review papers that demonstrate how astroinformatics and big data technologies are accelerating scientific discoveries, revolutionizing research paradigms, and shaping the future of astronomy.

Prof. Dr. Haijun Tian
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • astroinformatics
  • astronomical big data
  • machine and deep learning
  • artificial intelligence
  • data processing and visualization in astronomy
  • statistical inference
  • virtual observatory
  • scientific discovery

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 1413 KB  
Article
Solar Type III Radio Burst Identification Using Few-Shot Object Detection
by Haoxiang Jiang, Shoulin Wei, Linjie Chen, Bo Liang, Wei Dai, Zhijian Zhang and Heng Zhang
Universe 2026, 12(5), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/universe12050139 - 8 May 2026
Viewed by 235
Abstract
Solar radio bursts at very low frequencies are key phenomena in the Sun–Earth space environment, providing crucial diagnostics of the acceleration and propagation of solar wind, coronal mass ejection (CME), and non-thermal energetic particles and serving as important indicators for space weather forecasting. [...] Read more.
Solar radio bursts at very low frequencies are key phenomena in the Sun–Earth space environment, providing crucial diagnostics of the acceleration and propagation of solar wind, coronal mass ejection (CME), and non-thermal energetic particles and serving as important indicators for space weather forecasting. To meet the demand for rapid screening of burst events in large-scale observational datasets, we present an end-to-end automatic detection and evaluation framework tailored for Type III bursts, built upon long-term radio dynamic spectra from STEREO-A/SWAVES. We formulate radio burst detection as a one-dimensional interval localization task along the time axis and, in view of the scarcity of annotated samples, cast it as a few-shot object detection task. Building upon the Faster R-CNN architecture with a ResNet50-FPN backbone, we propose the Meta-FSOD framework, which adopts an episodic training paradigm to construct support–query episode pairs. The framework incorporates a metric-guided prototype learning branch to semantically align and calibrate region-of-interest (RoI) features via class prototypes, and integrates a dynamic Beta-Gating mechanism coupled with Soft-NMS to effectively suppress false positives while preserving high-recall performance. Experimental results demonstrate that, despite being trained on a significantly smaller dataset than comparable studies, Meta-FSOD achieves competitive performance, closely matching that of conventional supervised model. The proposed framework exhibits strong cross-temporal generalization capabilities and holds considerable potential for engineering applications in deep space exploration missions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Astroinformatics and Big Data in Astronomy)
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19 pages, 7743 KB  
Article
SpecZoo: An AI-Powered Platform for Spectral Analysis and Visualization in Science and Education
by Yuanhao Pu, Guohong Lei, Yang Xu, Xunzhou Chen and Haijun Tian
Universe 2026, 12(3), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/universe12030064 - 27 Feb 2026
Viewed by 518
Abstract
Astronomical spectra, which encode rich astrophysical and chemical information, are fundamental to understanding celestial objects and universal laws. The advent of large-scale spectroscopic surveys, generating tens of millions of spectra, presents significant challenges for efficient data processing and analysis. To address these challenges, [...] Read more.
Astronomical spectra, which encode rich astrophysical and chemical information, are fundamental to understanding celestial objects and universal laws. The advent of large-scale spectroscopic surveys, generating tens of millions of spectra, presents significant challenges for efficient data processing and analysis. To address these challenges, we develop an AI-powered platform (named “SpecZoo”) for spectral visualization and analysis. This platform integrates modern information technology and machine learning to lower the barrier to spectral data utilization and enhance research efficiency. Its core functionalities include interactive visualization, automated spectral classification, physical parameter measurement, spectral annotation, and multi-band/multi-modal data fusion, all supported by flexible user and data management systems. It has become an essential tool for the National Astronomical Data Center, directly supporting spectral data processing and research for major projects including LAMOST, SDSS, DESI, and so on. Furthermore, the platform demonstrates strong potential for science-education integration, providing a novel resource for cultivating talent in astronomy and data science. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Astroinformatics and Big Data in Astronomy)
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