Astronomical data fusion: recent progress and future prospects — a survey

Abstract

Over the past year, the discovery of the first electromagnetic counterparts to sources of gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos has brought us to the new era of ”multi-messenger” astrophysics (MMA). These new events provide deep insights into astrophysics, meanwhile, lead to the development of astronomical data fusion techniques. Each messenger carries information from different observation process and fusing all messengers can therefore provide the best understanding of the celestial objects’ attributes and expose various astrophysical phenomena. Over the decades, for the full exploitation of multi-band astronomical data, advanced unified platforms and data fusion techniques have been developed and become a research topic of interest for the astronomical community. In this paper, we present a systematic review of the popular and state-of-the-art fusion methods and platforms in different formats of astronomical data, aiming to give a comprehensive introduction to the current progress in this field; at the same time, we put forward insightful prospects for future study of multi-messenger data fusion, hoping to provide new thoughts for researchers in MMA era.