The science team behind the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially launched a decennial survey of the southern sky – an ambitious project three decades in the making.
The launch of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, follows years of planning and construction of a billion-dollar observatory in Chile. Scientists celebrated the completion of the construction phase with a series of “First Look” photos last year, and then turned to preparations for LSST in earnest.
In February, Rubin’s team opened the Alert Generation Pipeline, which can send millions of alerts about potentially significant astronomical events. That set the stage for what some have likened to filming a time-lapse movie of the cosmos.
“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made. This moment reflects decades of vision, innovation and the power of federal investment in science through the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy,” NSF director Brian Stone said in a news release. “Every night, the NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will expand the frontiers of knowledge and strengthen America’s global leadership in science and innovation.”
Researchers at the University of Washington have played a major role in the project, primarily by developing software tools to analyze the terabytes of data the observatory is expected to generate every night. That work was done at the UW’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology, also known as the DiRAC Institute.
UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezić, who leads the LSST mission, helped decide when the observatory was ready for the survey.
“The decision to officially launch LSST was made after a period of program development and a careful review of technical readiness performance, data system performance and scientific validation,” he said. Among the factors considered are image quality, operational test speed, system reliability and measurement accuracy.
The observatory uses the world’s largest digital camera (3,200 megapixels per image) to capture a new image every 40 seconds. If the sky over Chile is clear, the entire southern sky can be photographed in just a few nights. Then Rubin begins the next round of photography.
The idea for an observatory began with discussions among astronomers in the 1990s, and gained momentum in 2007 when Seattle-area technology pioneer Charles Simonyi and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates donated a total of $30 million to the project. In 2020, the observatory was named after the late astronomer Vera Rubin — and its 8.4-meter (27.5-foot) telescope was named the Simonyi Survey Telescope in honor of Simonyi’s family.
To celebrate the start of the survey, the Rubin Observatory team released a 1.7-gigapixel image showing a “sea of stars” in the constellation Lupus. “The dark, diffuse clouds in this image are galactic cirrus: clouds of interstellar gas and dust that can be seen in the foreground of the Milky Way,” the team said in the image advisory.
Distant stars aren’t Rubin’s only guides. The survey is also expected to greatly increase the search for smaller bodies in our solar system. During preparations for LSST, Rubin’s team reported the discovery of more than 11,000 previously unseen asteroids. And that’s just the beginning: Computer simulations suggest the survey could reveal more than 5 million asteroids.
Rubin’s observations may even shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the invisible components of the universe that together make up more than 95 percent of the mass energy content of the universe.
Scientists say the key to Rubin’s success will be the ability to track changes in the night sky over 10 years.
“With its world-class design and instruments, the Rubin Observatory will capture the dynamic nature of the universe and reveal unimagined details about the great mysteries of our world, from our solar system to the cosmic system,” said Dario Gil, under secretary for science at the US Department of Energy. “In seeking to understand the mysterious phenomena of dark energy and dark matter, we are not just looking at the stars; we are striving to understand the fundamental laws that govern our lives.”
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a joint project of NSF and the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and is jointly operated by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
