Rubin Observatory's "Discovery Machine": 800,000 alerts on the first night
The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory now automatically sends out alerts when something changes in the night sky. In the first night, there were 800,000.
A night sky full of events
(Image: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/P. Marenfeld/J. Pinto)
The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory is now automatically sending out alerts about changes in the night sky; in the first night alone, 800,000 of these warning messages were sent. This has alerted astronomers to previously unknown asteroids, exploding, and variable stars; write the responsible parties. It is expected that soon seven million such alerts will be generated per night, just a few minutes after each discovery. This is also due to the immense performance of the instrument, which in its first year of operation alone is expected to map more astronomical objects than all optical telescopes in human history combined. Expectations are accordingly high.
10 Terabytes of Image Data Per Night
The alert system was developed so that anyone can “detect interesting astronomical events in a timely manner and carry out time-critical follow-up observations quickly,” explains the head of the project group responsible for it. Eric Bellm points out that the new observatory shoots 10 terabytes of images of the night sky every night, from which the relevant information must be extracted as quickly as possible. Years of “technical innovations in image processing algorithms, databases, and data orchestration” were required for the pipeline that has now been put into operation. Now they can hardly wait to see what exciting science emerges from this data.
(Image: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA Acknowledgement: Alert images with classifications provided by ALeRCE and Lasair.)
On the occasion of the milestone, the telescope's managers recall that all images it takes are automatically compared with a template image. This is created from previous images of the same section of the sky and subtracted from the new image. Only the changes remain, each triggering an alert within two minutes. Mostly, these are due to exploding stars, active galactic nuclei, variable stars, or objects from the solar system moving rapidly across the sky. Based on the alerts, they can be quickly checked with other instruments. However, before that, they are pre-filtered by algorithms to find the truly interesting signals. So-called brokers do this and their alerts are publicly visible.
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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is located in Chile; its centerpiece is the world's largest digital camera. It is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and has a sensor array of 201 individual CCD sensors, each with 16 megapixels. In its observatory, the gigantic digital camera will benefit from a mirror with a diameter of 8.4 meters and a particularly large field of view. It will completely photograph the entire night sky every three to four nights and, within ten years, create the largest time-lapse of the starry sky ever. It is scheduled to begin later in the year; it is currently stated.
The new observatory is named after the astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who revolutionized our understanding of galaxies and made crucial contributions to the description of so-called dark matter. She is one of the most important researchers of the last century. Furthermore, she strongly advocated for the equal treatment of women in science. The astronomer, who passed away in 2019, received a number of prestigious awards, but was not awarded the Nobel Prize. Now her name lives on in one of the most important research instruments ever.
(mho)
