The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a revolutionary new imaging system located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, has issued its first ~800,000 scientific alerts documenting every visible change it captures with the world’s biggest digital camera. Rubin will image the complete southern sky every few nights for 10 years, making a decade-long ‘movie of the universe’.
“Rubin is going to change how we see the universe,” says Dr Anais Möller, from Swinburne University of Technology.
“We have never had such a big scale, systematic digital imaging of the southern sky before.”
Dr Möller leads a data broker called Fink, which receives scientific alerts direct from the observatory. The international collaboration, led by Australia and France, will put millions of discoveries directly in the hands of astronomers and the public.
“We receive that data every minute, with up to 10,000 detections that feature cutouts, like little patches of the sky,” says Dr Möller.
“We use machine learning and artificial intelligence to give a probability that this may be a tidal disruption event, a supernova, an asteroid, and so on.
“We take that data, process it, filter it, and make it publicly available.”
The alerts are generated and made public within minutes, allowing for rapid follow-up observations on other facilities, like the ANU 2.3m and Anglo Australian Telescope in New South Wales.
While the universe seems static to a casual viewer, it’s constantly evolving. Rubin’s initial batch of alerts featured supernovae, variable stars, active galactic nuclei, and Solar System asteroids.
“With your eyes, you don’t think the sky is changing much. But when you observe deep enough, you see flaring stars, asteroids passing by, and even satellites and space debris,” says Dr Möller.
Along with her leadership on Fink, Dr Möller is working across three Rubin science collaborations: probing dark energy (the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion); transients (stars that explode or are otherwise disrupted) and informatics and statistics.
“It’s really emotional, a little bit scary, but also a little bit like–wow–this is finally here.”
Of the first 800,000 alerts issued on February 25, Dr Möller’s team identified about 100 supernova candidates.
