Rubin Observatory Data Flood Will Let the Universe Alert Astronomers 10 Million Times a Night

Slam! Hiking! Popular! The universe is a place that takes place – full of explosive stars, eruption of black holes, asteroid ziping and much more. And astronomers have a whole new super powerful eye with which to see the cosmos changing: the Vera C. Rubin observatory in Chile.

The Rubin observatory published its first images last week, and they are breathtaking – fields of sparkling and sparkling stars which show the massive field of vision of the telescope and the spectacularly deep vision. But two of the most convincing aspects of Endeavor are difficult to transmit in any individual image, whatever the spectacular: the amount of data that Rubin will produce and the speed at which these data will flood in the work of astronomers.

“We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears,” explains Yusra Alsayyad, astronomer from Princeton University and Deputy Deputy Director of Rubin for data management. Whenever something is happening in the expansive view of Rubin, the observatory will automatically alert scientists who may be interested in looking more closely. Experience will be like receiving personalized notifications from the universe.

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It seems quite simple – until you hear the figures. “We are waiting for around 10,000 image alerts and 10 million alerts per night,” continues Alsayyad. “It is too much for a person to sift manually and to filter themselves and to watch out.” Alsayyad compares Rubin’s data flow to a Dash camera or a video doorbell that constantly films everything from a view. “You can’t sit there and look at it,” she says. “To use this video flow, you need data management.”

For Rubin, this means building a static image of the sky – a background model, so to speak – how easy changes. The telescope will build this static view during the first year approximately regular operations.

Once the background image for a particular section of the sky is ready, the real flood will begin. When the telescope takes its gigantic photographs, algorithms will first automatically correct the effects such as the wandering light of the sky and the blurred atmospheric turbulence of the image. Then, the algorithms will compare these images modified with the static model, marking each small difference – a 10,000 expected in each snapshot. There will be around 1,000 images per night, night after night, as long as Rubin remains in operation.

Astronomers love data, but no one has this kind of time in one day. Thus, each individual scientist (amateurs can also register) must first register with the so -called alert brokers of the Rubin Observatory. Users can request alerts on supernovae or asteroids, for example, then define constraints on how an event must be interesting to trigger a notification.

Such limitations are important because, once again, aligning 10 million alerts per night is an untenable perspective for anyone. “It’s really a kind of overwhelming data scale,” says Eric Bellm, astronomer at Washington University and the Chief of the Rubin Alert Production Science.

And this flood will continue for 10 years in a row while the Rubin observatory executes its signature project, nicknamed the Legacy survey on space and time (LSST). During this period, the telescope will zip its point of view in the sky in a carefully choreographed dance which will ultimately produce the best high definition film of the heavens that humanity has ever designed.

Rubin scientists have already sketched the basic investigation, explains Federica Bianco, astronomer and scientist of data at the University of Delaware and assistant project scientist at the Rubin Observatory. But many details will be developed along the way, which will allow them to program the telescope to adapt to the interests of the astronomical community, as well as all the sudden celestial surprises.

“Ten years ago, we did not really think the counterparts with gravitational waves, which is all the rage,” explains Bianco. (These counterparts are the light issuing sources of gravitational waves, the space-time undulations that scientists first measured in September 2015 using the detectors of the gravitational observatory interferometer twin (LIGO).)

“We really believe that the LSST itself will discover new things, will transform the way we think of the universe,” she adds. This means making the cosmos reactive observatory. “If this is true, then we must allow changes that allow us to capture these new physical, these new phenomena.”

For a science, the discoveries will be limited by all that the sky is graceful enough to give – a star must explode so that the Rubin observatory identifies a new supernova, for example. But a particularly intriguing case comes from planetary science within our own solar system. For centuries, astronomers have observations hung with asteroids and comets – rocky objects and icy perceptual which swarmed between and around the planets as orbit the sun.

All this effort has put more than 1.3 million asteroids in our catalogs, but astronomers expect that Rubin may identify three times three times as many new objects – probably without trying. When the LSST survey takes place at full capacity, alerts for new potential asteroids will be sent directly to an international group called the Minor Planet Center, which hands a database of all these space rocks.

“We sit in a way and these objects will be discovered and have been reported,” explains Meg Schwamb, astronomer of the Queen’s University Belfast. Schwamb Copréside le LSST Solar System Science Collaboration and worked to estimate what the telescope will find in our cosmic district.

And because these space rocks are already there, shaking through the solar system, Rubin will quickly accumulate discoveries, Schwamb and his colleagues predict – with some 70% of the new objects discovered during the first two years of the survey.

“It’s, I think, breathtaking. It really allows us to start looking at these objects, ”explains Schwamb. “There is an instant gratuity.”

All that Rubin does not study is so fast and not subtle; The observatory will also be a surprisingly powerful tool to probe the enigmatic dark matter which does not still produce galaxies and prevails over the normal and familiar matter that we know in our daily life. A way in which astronomers study this thing without light is to measure the way in which dark matter gravial deforms light from more distant objects. Researchers use this revealing effect to map the distribution of the enigmatic substance through the universe.

Decades ago, Anthony Tyson, now astrophysicist at the University of California Davis, wanted to do that exactly. “I proposed a project to [what was then] The largest telescope, the largest camera that existed, and has been refused, ”he recalls. In the long term, this proposal failed on the way to build its own superlative telescope, which has the largest digital camera in the world, at the Rubin Observatory, where he was the founding director and is now in scientific chief.

In the short term, however, he adopted an approach that now seems prophetic. “I decided that I may have to make another application to take the same data, but for a different purpose,” he said. He and his colleagues wrote a different proposal for the same telescope, this time by launching a study of radio-brilliant plasma from around the supermassive black holes at the heart of the galaxies. He obtained the observation time – as well as the distorted light of the invisible tufts of black matter scattered along the line of view of the telescope. “It was the scam,” he quips.

Now decades later, the Rubin observatory opens the eyes of astronomers on a new vision of the universe. And although it does not observe radio light, it will certainly observe lots of active galactic nuclei – by tens of millions, in fact, repeatedly reimbursing the time of sly Tyson telescope.