Pa. - Astronomers were instrumental in establishing the principles of statistics during the 17th through 19th centuries, but statistics and astronomy diverged in the early 20th century. Today, astronomers are not taught the latest statistical methods. This has not always been the case. Newton's description of the motion of the heavens based on the gravitation laws created a need for statistics, and a variety of statistical practices were developed for astronomy. One attempt that worked was by a French astronomer, Adrien Legendre, who published a new method, minimizing the sum of squares of errors, for determining the orbits of comets in 1805.
Modern observations produce gigabytes of information everyday.
Over a year, terabytes of information are not unusual. These huge amounts of data pose problems for astronomers not only because of their size, but also because the number of individual properties recorded are large, creating multivariate databases. Modern techniques now also make it possible to record information continuously through time-creating time series. These types of databases are best handled with such statistical methods as time series analysis, sampling theory, multivariate analysis and nonlinear regressions. Applying such methods to astronomy forms the basis of the newly named field of astrostatistics.