One of the key question of the modern astrophysics is revealing and understanding the large scale structure of the Universe. Is the distrbution of the matter in the Universe fractal-like? Are there larger structures than galaxy super-clusters?
In the last decade the technical evolution of the telescopes and even more the CCD cameras resulted in a revolution in astronomy and astrophysics. Large automatic surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) are detecting millions of objects, creating a detailed map of the visible Universe, and even larger projects are on the way.
The real task is of course not just getting a spectacular picture of super-galactic structures. By measuring the matter distribution, we can estimate the cosmological parameters, we can fine-tune the physical models of the Universe. These models together with the observations will tell us about the birth of the Universe and determine the ratio of visible and dark matter.
Besides the telescope building and theory making, the last decade brought a new challenge for the researchers: the enormous amount of the complex data which streams out from the observing equipments. We need new paradigms to be able to handle these multi-terabyte data sets, and extract as much scientific information as possible.
There are a lot of small questions in the details until we can put together the big picture. Istvan Csabai, - member of the SDSS project, - and his students are specialized in the field of photometric redshift estimation and building and serching large scientific databases .

The best 3 dimensional map of the Universe. The above animation is based on the cca. 5 million galaxies in the SDSS Early Data Release. There is no visible structure in the distribution of the most distant quasars (white dots) but galaxies (yellow and green dots) are clustered on a foam-like structure. (The slices are not physical, they are caused by the survey geometry)Click on the image to see the animation (cca 5Mb)!

Selected publications:

Istvan Csabai, Tamas Budavari, Andrew J. Connolly, Alexander S. Szalay, Zsuzsanna Gyõry et al.
The Application of Photometric Redshifts to the SDSS Early Data Release
submitted to Astronomical Journal [pdf]

Tamas Budavari, Istvan Csabai, Alexander S. Szalay, Andrew J. Connolly, Gyula P. Szokoly et al.
Photometric redshifts from reconstructed QSO templates
Astronomical Journal 122 1163 (2001) [pdf]

P.Z. Kunszt, A.S. Szalay I. Csabai and A.R. Thakar:
The Indexing of the SDSS Science Archive;
Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IX, ASP Conferences Series, Vol 216 (2000); [pdf]

Connolly, A. J.; Csabai, I.; Szalay, A. S.; Koo, D. C.; Kron, R. G.; Munn, J. A.
Slicing Through Multicolor Space: Galaxy Redshifts from Broadband Photometry
Astronomical Journal 110 2655 (1995) [pdf]

Are you interested? Send an e-mail to István Csabai.