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Ross Andersen writes that the amount of data about the universe is doubling every year because of big telescopes that capture greater portions of the sky and better light detectors that are "subject to the exponential force of Moore's Law." He adds, "That means that these enormous images are increasingly dense with pixels, and they're growing fast---the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled to become operational in 2015, has a three-billion-pixel digital camera. So far, our data storage capabilities have kept pace with the massive output of these electronic stargazers. The real struggle has been figuring out how to search and synthesize that output."
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