Latest news with #Rubin
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.'
Globe and Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
If I Could Buy Only 1 AI Stock Over the Next Year, Nvidia Would Be It. Here's the Key Reason.
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang has been defining how the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will evolve. New terms like "sovereign AI" and "AI factories" are being splashed all over business news sites. But what do they really mean? For investors, one thing they should mean is that Nvidia remains the one stock to buy to take advantage of global AI growth. The company has been the leader in selling the hardware needed to support massive compute power being tapped to develop and train large language models (LLMs). But there is much more to the AI ecosystem that Nvidia is already tapping into that will become its next catalyst for growth. AI factories are going global AI factories are what Jensen Huang calls specialized data center facilities designed to develop, train, and deploy AI models at scale. He has been traveling the globe to promote Nvidia's leading role in scaling up these Blackwell-powered factories. Nvidia will also be following its Blackwell GPU architecture with the next-generation Rubin platform in 2026. These Nvidia component-based systems will support sovereign nation digital advancements around the world. These include the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) massive Stargate data center campus, Germany's sovereign AI factory run by telecom giant Deutsche Telekom, and European data center projects being developed by other nations. At a recent Paris tech summit, Huang summarized how the continent is scaling AI solutions, stating, "We now have a new industry, an AI industry, and it's now part of the new infrastructure, called intelligence infrastructure, that will be used by every country, every society." Nvidia will be a major benefactor of this expanding infrastructure. Its powerful GPU clusters, software infrastructure, and networking solutions will all be prominent in many of these large data centers. That's the reason I think Nvidia's growth will continue, and its stock should respond in turn. It's the one stock I would continue to add to my portfolio over the next year if I were only allowed to choose a single name. Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now? Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $689,813!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $906,556!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is809% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to175%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 23, 2025
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
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Behold! World's Largest Camera Snaps Millions of Galaxies in First Pics
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just dropped its very first images. Expected to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe, the new eye on the sky hasn't disappointed. For 10 hours, the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy facility stared deep into the cosmos, using its powerful camera to record in near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths. The result is a tantalizing and exciting set of observations that bode well for the years to come. "NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will capture more information about our Universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined," says Brian Stone, acting director of the NSF. "Through this remarkable scientific facility, we will explore many cosmic mysteries, including the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the Universe." Rubin's first mission is a 10-year survey of the southern sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Every few days, it will observe the entire sky, recording each section around 800 times using the telescope's 3,200-megapixel camera (the largest in the world) to effectively compile an unprecedented 10-year timelapse of the Universe. Related: The mission is designed to capture anything that moves, flashes, or pulses – a remit that includes asteroids, comets, supernovae, and pulsars; from taking an asteroid inventory of the Solar System to cataloguing exploding stars billions of light-years away. In its first images, Rubin demonstrates some of that range, recording an extremely detailed, massive image of the Milky Way Trifid and Lagoon nebulae, two dense molecular clouds bubbling with hidden star formation. In 7.2 hours, the telescope took 678 individual images for a final mosaic coming in at just under 5 gigapixels. You should go have a play with the interactive zoomable image – it's a delight. In another image, the observatory showcases its ability to zoom in on a patch of sky, revealing around 10 million galaxies in a tightly focused field of view around the Virgo cluster. There's a zoomable version here. Finally, the Rubin team revealed the Solar System asteroids the telescope was able to observe – including a whopping 2,104 orbiting bits of rock we've never seen before, in just over 10 hours of observations. Annually, about 20,000 new asteroids are discovered by all other ground-based telescopes combined – Rubin looks to blow them out of the water. None of the asteroids discovered by Rubin pose a hazard to Earth, but the discoveries show what a powerful tool the observatory will be in Earth defense against hazardous space rocks. "Rubin Observatory is the first of its kind: its mirror design, camera size and sensitivity, telescope speed, and computing infrastructure are each in an entirely new category," the NSF and DOE say. "With Rubin data we will all understand our Universe better, chronicle its evolution, delve into the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, and reveal answers to questions we have yet to imagine." Excelsior. 2032 'City-Killer' Impact Threatens Earth's Satellites, Study Finds Check It Out! Rubin Observatory Reveals First Glimpses of Stunning Space Images Fast Radio Bursts Reveal Where The Universe's Missing Matter Is Hiding
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Life on the other side: Refugees from 'old media' flock to the promise of working for themselves
NEW YORK (AP) — Six months ago, Jennifer Rubin had no idea whether she'd make it in a new media world. She just knew it was time to leave The Washington Post, where she'd been a political columnist for 15 years. The Contrarian, the democracy-focused website that Rubin founded with partner Norm Eisen in January, now has 10 employees and contributors like humorist Andy Borowitz and White House reporter April Ryan. Its 558,000 subscribers also get recipes and culture dispatches. In the blink of an eye, Rubin became a independent news entrepreneur. 'I think we hit a moment, just after inauguration, when people were looking for something different and it has captured people's imaginations,' she says. 'We've been having a ball with it.' YouTube, Substack, TikTok and others are spearheading a full-scale democratization of media and a generation of new voices and influencers. But don't forget the traditionalists. Rubin's experience shows how this world offers a lifeline to many at struggling legacy outlets who wanted — or were forced — to strike out on their own. Tough business realities, changing consumer tastes The realities of business and changing consumer tastes are both driving forces. YouTube claims more than 1 billion monthly podcast views, and a recent list of its top 100 shows featured seven refugees from legacy media and six shows made by current broadcasters. Substack, which launched in 2017 and added live video in January, has more than doubled its number of paid subscribers to participating content creators to 5 million in less than two years. Almost immediately after he was cut loose by ABC News on June 10 for an anti-Trump tweet, Terry Moran headed for Substack. Two former hosts of NBC's 'Today' show — Katie Couric and Hoda Kotb — announced new media ventures on the same day last month. 'I think you've seen, really in the last six months for some reason, this whole space explode with people who are understanding that this is a really important way to convey information,' says Couric, who's been running her own media company with newsletters, interviews and a podcast since 2017 and recently joined Substack. Among the most successful to make transitions are Bari Weiss, the former New York Times writer whose Free Press website celebrates independent thought, the anti-Trump Republicans at Bulwark and ex-MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who champions 'adversarial journalism' on Zeteo. Television news essentially left Megyn Kelly for dead after her switch from Fox News to NBC went bust. She launched a podcast in 2020, at first audio only, and SiriusXM picked it up as a daily radio show. She added video for YouTube in 2021, and gets more than 100 million viewers a month for commentary and newsmaker interviews. This year, Kelly launched her own company, MK Media, with shows hosted by Mark Halperin, Maureen Callahan and Link Lauren. While they thrive, the prospect of layoffs, audiences that are aging and becoming smaller and constant worry about disappearing revenue sources are a way of life for legacy media. Moving to independent media is still not an easy decision. Taking a deep breath, and making the leap 'If I'm going to jump off a cliff, is there water or not?' former 'Meet the Press' moderator Chuck Todd says. 'I didn't know until I left NBC. Everybody told me there would be water. But you don't know for sure until you jump.' It takes some adjustment — 'At first I was like, 'do you know who I used to be?'' Couric jokes — but some who have made the jump appreciate the nimbleness and flexibility of new formats and say news subjects often respond to the atmosphere with franker, more expansive interviews. Jim Acosta, who traded a CNN anchor desk for a video podcast he does from his home after deciding not to make a move he considered a demotion, says he's been surprised at the quality of guests he's been able to corral — people like Hakeem Jefferies, Pete Buttigieg and Sean Penn. Many podcasters succeed because they communicate authenticity, former Washington Post editor Marty Baron said in an interview at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Traditional journalists trade on authority at a time people don't trust institutions anymore, he said. Couric has seen it in some of the feedback she gets from subscribers. 'There's some disenchantment with legacy media,' she says. 'There are certainly some people who are frustrated by the capitulation of some networks to the administration, and I think there's a sense that when you're involved in mainstream media that you may be holding back or there may be executives who are putting pressure on you.' Is there an audience — and money — on the other side? Substack says that more than 50 people are earning more than $1 million annually on its platform. More than 50,000 of its publishers make money, but since the company won't give a total of how many people produce content for the platform, it's impossible to get a sense of the odds of success. Alisyn Camerota isn't making money yet. The former CNN anchor left the broadcaster after she sensed her time there was running out. Blessed with a financial cushion, she's relishing the chance to create something new. She records a video podcast, 'Sanity,' from her basement in Connecticut. A former Fox colleague who lives nearby, Dave Briggs, joins to talk about the news. 'It's harder than you think in terms of having to DIY a lot of this,' Camerota says, 'but it's very freeing.' Different people on the platform have different price points; some publishers put everything they do behind a pay wall, others only some. Acosta offers content for free, but people need to pay to comment or discuss. Zeteo charges $12 a month or $72 a year, with a $500 'founding member' yearly fee that offers access to Mehdi. The danger for independent journalists is a market reaching a saturation point. People already stress over how many streaming services they can afford for entertainment. There's surely a limit to how many journalists they will pay for, too. 'I hope to make a living at this,' Acosta says. 'We'll see how it goes. This is a bit of an experiment. I think it's a valuable one because the stakes are so high right now.' A strong point of view is one route to success To succeed in independent media, people need a strong work work ethic, self-motivation and an ability to pivot quickly to deal with changing markets, says Chris Balfe, founder of Red Seat Ventures. He has created a thriving business ushering conservative media figures into the new world, including Kelly, Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan. Balfe's clients all have strong opinions. That's a plus for consumers who want to hear their viewpoints reflected back at them. 'I think you need a point of view and a purpose," Rubin says. "Once you have that, it helps you to organize your thinking and your selections. You're not going to be all things to all people.' That's one of the things that concerns Acosta and Todd. They're looser, and they certainly say what they think more than they felt free to do on television; a remark Acosta made on June 17, while appearing on Rubin's podcast, about Trump marrying immigrants was criticized as 'distasteful' by the White House. But at heart, they consider themselves reporters and not commentators. Is there enough room for people like them? Todd has a podcast, a weekly interview show on the new platform Noosphere and is looking to build on an interest in improving the fortunes of local news. He believes that opinion can help someone build an audience quickly but may ultimately limit growth. As Rubin did, they will find out soon enough. 'As it turned out," she says, 'what was on the other side was much more exciting and successful and absorbing than I could ever have imagined.' ___ David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at and
