Millennium Institute of Astrophysics – MAS

Chile, thanks to its atmospheric conditions, has a privileged position in astronomical terms. Chile currently accounts for 40% of worldwide capacity for astronomical observation and is expected to be at 70% in 2024, with revolutionary new telescopes such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). These advances require the development of new algorithms and intelligent software to analyze the information and thus interdisciplinary collaboration between astronomers, mathematicians and statistical engineers.

The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, MAS, was founded with the objective of preparing a new generation of researchers for this so-called “Big Data era,” bringing together a multidisciplinary team of scholars and students from prestigious Chilean universities and a wide network of international collaboration.

Its main goals are to carry out massive and large-scale explorations of the sky; to develop efficient data analysis techniques in order to extract relevant information from large volumes astrophysical data; to participate in programs of instrument construction and others that allow the incorporation of the country into the world of cutting-edge technologies related to astronomy and to develop front-line research in the astrophysics area, exploiting a new dimension of the human exploration of the universe: The Time Domain. Work at MAS is organized into four lines of research: discovery and characterization of supernovas and their use as distance indicators; the Milky Way and the Local Group; Transients, Variables and Planets; and Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics.