Rubin Observatory has begun searching astronomers 800,000 times a night

Rubin Observatory has begun searching astronomers 800,000 times a night

By Meghan Bartels edited by Lee Billings

Wake up, astronomers – the universe is calling.

The astronomical observatory equipped with the world’s largest camera reached an important milestone on February 24, when a complex data processing system pushed out hundreds of thousands of alerts to scientists eager to study the most exciting observations.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began operations last year, capturing stunning panoramic views of the cosmos with ease. Rubin’s first images, based on just 10 hours of observations, allow space fans to zoom seemingly forever into a stunning starry sky. But vigilant astronomers were always waiting for the next step: the system that would automatically alert them to the most promising activity in the sky above among the 1,000 or so huge images that Rubin’s telescope captures each night.

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“We can detect anything that changes, moves, and pops up,” Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin’s associate associate director for data management, told Scientific American last summer. “It’s way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves.”

READ MORE: Astronomers prepare for 10 million alerts a night from the Rubin Observatory

So even as they designed and built the Rubin Observatory itself, the researchers also developed a warning system to help astronomers navigate the deluge of data. As soon as the telescope began observing, the team began constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail.

Now the computing systems supporting the observatory automatically begin comparing each new Rubin image to the corresponding part of the background template. The systems identify all the differences, each of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between a potential supernova and a possible newly discovered asteroid, for example.

Notifying the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers – as well as members of the public – can sign up for alerts based on the type of observation they’re interested in and the brightness of the particular observation. And now that the notification system has gone live, users receive a small, blurry image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits their criteria—all just a few minutes after Rubin captures the original image.

On February 24, the first night of public access, the system created and distributed about 800,000 alerts, sending out alerts about rocketing asteroids, exploding stars, blazing supermassive black holes and other transient celestial events. That number is expected to grow to millions of alerts every single night.

“The scale and speed of the alerts is unprecedented,” Hsin-Fang Chiang, a software developer at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who is collaborating with Rubin, said in a press release. “After generating hundreds of thousands of test alerts over the past few months, we can now say, within minutes, with each image, ‘here’s everything’ and ‘go.’

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