Latest news with #LSST
Geek Wire
a day ago
- Science
- Geek Wire
University of Washington celebrates Rubin Observatory's debut — and looks ahead
University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic talks about the Rubin Observatory — a project in which he played a leading role — with an image of the facility displayed behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) It's been more than two decades since the University of Washington helped kick off the effort to get the Vera C. Rubin Observatory built in Chile — and now that it's finished, UW astronomers are gearing up to get in on the first decade of discoveries. The university's role in the past, present and future of the Rubin Observatory and its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, literally took center stage in front of a packed house at UW's Kane Hall on Thursday night. UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, who served as director of Rubin construction and is shifting his focus to his role as head of science operations for LSST, recalled the night of April 15, when Rubin's first test images came in for fine tuning. 'We were all so happy, and we are still happy,' he said. 'We had been dreaming about this night for two decades, and it finally arrived. And not only that, we quickly obtained beautiful data, but also we continued to do so, and every new image was better and better. The observatory is performing beyond all our expectations.' Ivezic showed off the images of swirling galaxies and colorful nebulas that he first unveiled earlier in the week at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. And he talked up an online tool called Skyviewer that allows users to click around the observatory's 3,200-megapixel images and zoom in on details. 'It's an easy-to-use app,' he told the audience. 'When you go home tonight, then you can spend the next few hours just going around. Turn off the light in your room and then look at your screen, and it will be fantastic.' University of Washington Zeljko Ivezic shows off his Rubin Observatory necktie and matching nail polish. The tie is on sale via the Startorialist website. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) The University of Washington's involvement in the Rubin Observatory goes back to the early 2000s, when astronomers began considering how a next-generation sky survey might be accomplished. In its early years, the project was known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (which set the precedent for the LSST acronym). UW was one of four founding partners of the LSST Corporation, an entity that was set up to get the project started. (That nonprofit group, which was subsequently renamed the LSST Discovery Alliance, now has 40 member institutions.) In 2008, the project got a huge boost from Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi — who donated $10 million and $20 million, respectively, to support early work on the telescope's 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror. As the years went on, support for the project grew, fueled by a high rating in the National Research Council's 2010 Decadal Survey. Eventually, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for building the observatory in Chile, where dry air and dark skies made for optimal viewing conditions. In 2019, the observatory was officially named in honor of astronomer Vera Rubin, who analyzed galactic rotation rates to nail down the first convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter. The survey telescope, meanwhile, was named after Simonyi's family in recognition of his early gift. Today, UW's Rubin Observatory team consists of about 75 faculty members and graduate students, plus scores of undergraduates. University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, the team's principal investigator, noted that UW played an essential role in getting the observatory up and running. 'None of this would be possible without the Rubin team right here at UW,' he told Thursday night's audience. Members of the University of Washington's team for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time pose for a group picture after a presentation at UW's Kane Hall. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) That essential role will continue into the next decade. In partnership with Princeton University, UW's team is responsible for the software that processes the trillions of bytes of image data that are generated by the observatory on a nightly basis. That work meshes with the leading roles in Rubin operations that are performed by the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. 'We're here to figure out how to build algorithms to get the most out of data, how to make the software work as well as it can,' Juric told GeekWire. Andrew Connolly, another UW astronomer who is the director of the university's eScience Institute, said the university's researchers are relying on machine learning and other artificial intelligence strategies 'to accelerate our discoveries.' 'We build AI that allows us to study the variability in time series data. We build new tools at U Dub to search for the signatures of a distant planet in the outskirts of our solar system,' he said. 'We even use AI to improve the image quality and the sharpness of the images that you see.' Astronomers expect the data from Rubin to reveal millions of previously undetected asteroids in our own solar system, shed light on the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, track phenomena including gamma-ray bursts and supernovas, and capture images of billions of galaxies repeatedly over the coming decade. James Davenport — who is the newly named director of the university's DiRAC Institute, taking a handoff from Juric — said it's going to be an exciting 10 years. 'We are going to discover things we don't expect,' he said.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
‘New era in astronomy.' Penn State helps develop world's most powerful survey telescope
Professors at Penn State helped develop the world's most powerful survey telescope, which released its first images earlier this week from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. The images capture cosmic phenomena at an 'unprecedented scale,' the observatory said in a press release. For the next 10 years, the observatory will conduct the 'Legacy Survey of Space and Time,' an international project to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time lapse record of the universe, a release from Penn State says. The university has been an LSST member institution since 2005, and faculty members have had roles on the LSST board and other committees and collaborations. Donald Schneider, distinguished professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and the university's representative on the LSST-Discovery Alliance Institutional Board, has been interested in this project since he first heard about it around 2000. J. Anthony Tyson, now the Rubin Observatory LSST chief scientist, came up with the general concept of a telescope that could take deep pictures of the entire sky every night to look for things that moved, changed in brightness, and other aspects, Schneider told the CDT. Penn State joined the collaboration and had roles in both the science collaboration and in project management, he said. The Rubin Observatory on the Cerro Pachón mountaintop in Chile uses a 3,200-megapixel camera the size of a car to scan the entire visible southern sky every three to four nights. 'The sky will be imaged in six different filters covering the range from blue to near-infrared light. By stitching the resulting clips together, the LSST collaboration will produce the most detailed time-lapse view of the cosmos that has ever existed,' the university said in a release. W. Niel Brandt, the Eberly Family Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics (and professor of physics at Penn State and co-chair of the LSST Active Galactic Nuclei Science Collaboration), said in a release between the impressive camera and the wide field of view, the Rubin Observatory will 'launch a new era in astronomy.' It will allow them to better detect real-time changes in the sky and rare events, he said. Schneider said the telescope has a large mirror, about 320 inches across, so it can gather a lot of light and detect very faint objects over a large part of the sky. 'You've heard of the James Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope, they can go very deep. They can actually go deeper than the Rubin telescope can, but only over a tiny fraction of the area,' he told the CDT. 'So, when the Rubin takes a picture, it takes 45 full moons. … Every time it takes a picture, it takes that much sky. With the Hubble Space telescope or the James Webb, it's just a tiny fraction of the moon that they can take a picture of.' The first pictures released on Monday were 'spectacular,' Schneider said. Looking at a picture on your TV or computer screen doesn't give the full effect because there aren't enough pixels, so the image is super compressed. 'It's just so compressed, there aren't enough pixels on the TV to show what the picture does. They're 3.2 billion pixels … your eye just can't grasp it, and the TV just can't display it. You need something the size of a basketball court to display it,' he said. 'It takes seven of those pictures every minute throughout the night, so you can imagine how many basketball courts you would have to rent in order to display a night's worth of data.' The facility is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director, said in a press release the Rubin Observatory will 'capture more information about the universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined.' The telescope was designed with many science programs, but one that may be particularly interesting to the public is about near-earth asteroids. Schneider said they know where the big asteroids are, but there are still rocks out there that he thinks are the size of a football field or larger. If one of those hits earth, it would be a bad situation, so Schneider said they need to be able to track them so they can find them early and adjust their orbits. When the first images from the telescope were released this week, he said one thing that impressed him the most was a chart that showed all of the new asteroids they discovered from just one picture. The data gathered during the survey will be public, so you don't need to be a professional astronomer to learn from the project. 'There's a great opportunity for amateur astronomers, or just people that are casually interested in astronomy, or high schools, for example,' he said. 'It would be great lab experiments. You know, you get your part of the sky, what's there? What's interesting? So I'm very excited by this opportunity.'
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Rubin Observatory takes its 1st look at the night skies
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Recently, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory shared its first images with the world: stunning photographs of spiral galaxies, nebulas, and stars strung across our universe. The technology used to capture these images was years in the making, and will help launch a whole new era of studying the night sky. The Rubin Observatory houses the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope and its corresponding LSST camera (LSSTCam), the largest digital camera in the world. Using these tools, the Rubin Observatory studies faint objects in our solar system as astronomers try to study the dark matter that makes up a majority of our universe. The Rubin Observatory resides in Cerro Pachón in the Andes Mountains in Chile. The Rubin Observatory was born out of a decades-long quest by astronomers to understand what dark matter actually is. In the 1990s, a group of scientists began to brainstorm an idea for a telescope just focused on studying dark matter. According to the Rubin Observatory, this idea for a "Dark Matter Telescope" began to gain traction, and by the 2010s the instrument, now called the Large-Aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) started to be built in Chile. As the telescope was designed to study extremely faint objects in our solar system, along with most of our asteroids, it needed to be placed away from cities and other areas with more light pollution. The LSST camera, comprising of 3200 megapixels, was built at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California before being shipped to Chile. In 2019 the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in honor of female astronomer Vera Rubin and her work in studying dark matter. The Rubin Observatory released its first batch of images on June 23, 2025 as it had scanned the night skies only a few days prior, finding over 2,000 asteroids in the process. With a scanning area of over 45 full moons in size, the Rubin Observatory can survey our galaxy 10 to 100 times faster than similar observatories. You can read more about the search for dark matter and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory as astronomers continue to uncover more about our universe.
Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Science
- Hindustan Times
A new telescope will find billions of asteroids, galaxies and stars
On April 15th, at 8pm local time, the Vera Rubin Observatory recorded its very first photons of starlight. At first, the images that filled the screens in the control room on Cerro Pachón, 2,500 metres high on the foothills of the Andes in northern Chile, looked like a field of snowy static on an old television. But, zoomed in, the spots soon resolved into an uncountable number of stars and galaxies floating between enormous, wispy clouds of dust, like tiny multicoloured flecks of paint spattered across a vast black wall. 'There was this huge amount of cheering and screaming, people were getting teary-eyed,' recalls Alysha Shugart, a physicist who watched the events unfold on the night. 'Those little photons had no idea of the red carpet that was rolled out for their reception.' PREMIUM Representative photo, (Pexels) The arrival of those photons—many from ancient stars and galaxies and which had been travelling across the universe for billions of years—marked a neat moment of symmetry. It had been exactly ten years since work had started on Cerro Pachón to build the observatory; it also marked the start of a ten-year project—the legacy survey of space and time (LSST)—that will see the Rubin telescope repeatedly take ultra-high-resolution pictures of the entire night sky of the southern hemisphere every three or four days. Rubin will see more detail about the cosmos, and unlock more of its unknowns, than any machine that has come before. It will collect so much information—trillions of data points on more than 40bn new stars, galaxies and other cosmic objects—so quickly that it will transform astronomy in its wake. In its first year alone, it will double the amount of data collected so far by every other instrument in the history of optical astronomy. It will collect 20 terabytes of raw image data every night and, over the course of the LSST, will produce more than 500 petabytes of images and analysis. For the first time astronomers will also have a decade-long time-lapse of the night sky. That last part is what has scientists most expectant. Astronomical observatories until now have focused on taking detailed snapshots of tiny points in the night sky. But 'the sky and the world aren't static,' says Yusra Al-Sayyad, a researcher at Princeton University who oversees Rubin's image-processing algorithms. 'There are asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding.' Many of those fast or transient objects can only be seen by big observatories if they happen to be pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time. 'Today we don't really have a very full, wide and deep picture of the universe,' says Leanne Guy, a physicist at Rubin. Rubin will fix that gap. Its 1.7m-long, 3,200-megapixel camera—the biggest digital camera ever built—has an enormous field of view, equivalent to an area of sky covered by 45 full Moons. The camera will be fed starlight reflected off a primary mirror that is 8.4m wide and which took scientists at the University of Arizona seven years to grind into its unique shape. Despite their size, the mirrors, telescope and the giant silver dome that houses it can all move together extremely fast. The telescope will be able to take an image every 30 seconds and its 'brain'—a piece of software known as the scheduler—will use machine-learning algorithms to automatically work out the best places to point the camera, every night, as it attempts to cover as much of the sky as possible while also avoiding obstructions, such as clouds or satellites streaking overhead. Over the course of a decade, each point in the sky will be photographed around 800 times. In an image released this week by the Rubin team, for example, stitching together ten hours of observations, astronomers identified more than 2,000 asteroids in the solar system that had never been seen before (including seven near-Earth asteroids). For comparison, around 20,000 asteroids are discovered in total every year by all other ground and space-based observatories. During the LSST, Rubin will conduct the most detailed census yet of millions of as-yet-unknown objects in the solar system, including tripling the number of known objects that could come near to the Earth and finding around 70% of asteroids classed as 'potentially hazardous', ie, bigger than 140m wide. If, as some scientists reckon, there is a ninth planet hidden in the clouds of rocks somewhere far beyond Neptune, Rubin will find it. Celestial surveillance The census-taking will stretch far beyond the solar system. Because the LSST camera will keep coming back to the same point in the sky many times during its decade-long survey, astronomers will be able to combine many images of the same location. The fainter an object, the farther away and older it is likely to be and, therefore, hundreds of stacked images will eventually reveal the very earliest stars and galaxies. By recording details—such as the colours, shapes, positions and movements—of more than 17bn stars and 20bn galaxies, Rubin is expected to produce a catalogue of the night sky that cosmologists can then use to build their most detailed picture yet of the early universe and examine how it has evolved over time. That will be crucial for two of the prime goals of the Rubin observatory—understanding the nature of dark matter and of dark energy. It is this dark universe for which Rubin was first conceived in the late 1990s. The observatory's namesake, Vera Rubin, was an American astronomer who, in the 1970s, made her name by measuring that the stars at the edge of the nearby Andromeda galaxy were moving just as fast as those at the centre, impossible if only normal matter was present. Her discovery provided evidence of the existence of 'dark' matter, which cannot be seen and interacts with normal matter only through gravity. Two decades later, scientists discovered an even bigger hole in the universe—a mysterious substance was found to be accelerating the rate at which space was expanding. Dark energy, it turned out, made up 68% of the mass in the universe and dark matter made up around 27%. Only around 5% comes from the familiar 'normal' matter that makes up stars, planets, dust and everything on Earth. Understanding how the invisible dark universe behaves depends on better observations of the visible one. One of the ways in which Rubin's LSST will help is by measuring how the light from very distant galaxies is distorted by the gravitational force of the matter between them and Earth. These measurements will give astronomers details about how matter is arrayed in the universe and also how it is moving. Both are important clues to the nature of the dark universe. The study of dark energy, in particular, will get a boost. The phenomenon was discovered in the 1990s when scientists were studying the movements of the few dozen supernovae that they knew about at the time. Rubin will, according to the scientists working there, be a 'supernova factory', potentially discovering billions more of these exploding stars, providing cosmologists with a vastly bigger data set to study more deeply and precisely, and with much better statistics, the way that dark energy behaves. Rubin's data will not stay on the mountaintop in Chile. Less than ten seconds after the LSST camera's shutters close every day, everything will be transferred, through dedicated optical fibres, to computers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California (backups will go to data centres in France and Britain). At SLAC, an automated process will first clean up the images and carry out an initial analysis that will look for objects that have, say, appeared for the first time or significantly changed position or brightness since the previous night. These changes—there will probably be millions per night—will be quickly winnowed down (by more specialised algorithms) into a priority list and passed on to other observatories around the world who can then follow up with more detailed direct measurements of their own. All of this will happen autonomously. 'There's absolutely no way any human being could go through these alerts by eye,' says Dr Guy. 'There's no way.' The LSST is scheduled to begin at Rubin in October. In the meantime, the instruments sitting on Cerro Pachón will continue to be tested, re-tested and calibrated. Though Rubin's primary mission is set for now, the scientists who have built the observatory know that what they ultimately have at their disposal is a discovery machine. 'What I'm most excited about seeing from Rubin in the long term,' says Dr Guy, 'are the things we've never even thought about.' Correction (June 24th): In the original version of this story, we underestimated the number of supernovae that scientists knew about in the 1990s.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Wisconsin science, industry play critical roles in creating powerful new Rubin Observatory
Light from faraway galaxies can show us what the universe was like billions of years ago. But the movements and mysteries of those galaxies tell physicists that we still don't know what makes up the vast majority of the universe. 'How did it begin? When will it end? What is it made of?' Keith Bechtol, a physics professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said these are some of the questions scientists will try to address with a new observatory in Chile featuring the biggest camera ever built. The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, released the first set of images on June 23. The stunning images represent the fruits of a decades-long effort to push the study of the cosmos well past its current limits. Building the Rubin Observatory, which sits on a summit in Chile's Andes Mountain range, spanned three decades and involved parts and people from three continents. Some of the most important support came from Wisconsin. Beginning in October 2025, the Rubin Observatory will embark on the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Over the next 10 years it will scan the entire Southern Hemisphere sky about 800 times, providing the most detailed look at the universe to date. The plan going forward sounds deceptively simple. Getting to the starting point was anything but that. 'The whole idea for the (Rubin) observatory was so visionary when it was conceived (in the 1990s) that many of the technologies didn't exist at that time' said Bechtol. Bechtol served as the System Verification and Validation Scientist for the international team in charge of the Rubin. He oversaw much of the testing that ensures scientists will reliably get the high-quality data they are seeking. Observatories usually face trade-offs between how big an area they scan, the resolution of the photos they take and how fast they can take them. The scientists designing the Rubin attacked these challenges on all three fronts. The Simonyi Survey Telescope installed uses an innovative mirror system to reflect incoming light onto a camera the size of a car. After scanning one piece of the sky, the whole system rapidly spins to look in a different direction, rotating in coordination with its protective dome while maintaining near perfect alignment of the mirrors. According to Bechtol, displaying one image at full resolution would require enough high-definition TVs to cover a basketball court. The final step in building the Rubin — installing the 80-ton mirror system — was made possible by the Milwaukee-based company PFlow Industries. Pieces of the telescope were assembled at a staging area but needed to be raised five stories to be installed in the dome. PFlow custom-built a lift capable of moving critical equipment from the assembly area to the dome. A video shared by Rubin Observatory shows this lift in action. During and after construction, Bechtol organized a series of 'rehearsals' to simulate how the Rubin will operate. He accounted for details including the workflow of operating it, the challenge of transferring massive amounts of data from the summit, and even making sure the summit hotel was staffed and had food for its residents. After nearly 30 years of dreaming, designing, building and testing, the first images from Rubin Observatory arrived. UW-Madison hosted a First Look Party on June 23 to view these images with the public. Nearly 100 people gathered in a physics department auditorium to watch a livestream of a press conference in Washington, D.C., before participating in a panel discussion with Bechtol and other scientists who will use data from the Rubin. Even though Monday was the first chance for the public to see the images, some of the scientists involved in the project had a sneak peek. 'I woke up in bed and saw messages' that the first images had come in, said Miranda Gorsuch, a graduate student at UW-Madison who has Bechtol as an advisor. 'It was like waking up from a dream.' Gorsuch plans to use the data to study the structure of the universe and how it evolves over time. Rubin Observatory is named after Vera C. Rubin, an astronomer who first provided observations suggesting we might not be able to see most of the matter making up the universe. Understanding the properties of this 'dark matter' is one of the top priorities for scientists who will use the collected data. But there is so much more to learn; the Rubin is already showing outer space in incredible detail. Just one small slice of our solar system imaged by Rubin Observatory already led to the discovery of 2,000 new asteroids. In one image of the full field of view, scientists detected 10 million galaxies — many for the first time. By repeatedly scanning the sky, scientists hope to use the Rubin as an alert system for rare events, like supernovae, which they can then observe in more focused follow-up studies. 'This is when science works best – when you have this interplay' between new discoveries and the new questions they raise, Bechtol said. 'There's a science case (for building the Rubin), but any time you do this, there is also a set of questions you haven't thought to ask yet' said Eric Wilcots, dean of the College of Letters and Science at UW-Madison. While UW-Madison was just one of many universities involved in the international project, Wilcots believes its participation will inspire future scientists and attract them to Wisconsin. Both Bechtol and Wilcots stressed the importance of sustained financial support from the NSF and DOE to bring the project to fruition. Rob Morgan was one of the first graduate students advised by Bechtol, working on a Dark Energy Survey that served as a precursor to Rubin Observatory. According to Morgan, the Rubin is the culmination of the astronomy field's shift towards a 'big data' approach. Now, Morgan applies the skills he learned as an astrophysicist to his work at Google's office in Madison. 'Google is where 'big data' is done for the rest of the world,' said Morgan. This week's image release represented a beginning. Scientists will spend years collecting and analyzing data. Still, the opening provided a moment worth cherishing. 'We don't get a lot of observatory openings,' said Alyssa Jankowski, who recently completed an undergraduate degree at UW-Madison. 'It's important to celebrate.' This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin science, industry help create new international observatory
