VERA RUBIN OBSERVATORY "FIRST LOOK" IMAGES ARE A STUNNER

Hey Space Placers!

I virtually attended the Vera Rubin Observatory https://rubinobservatory.org/  “First Look” press conference  https://www.youtube.com/@NSFScience/streams - see First Images video - held today to introduce VRO and release first images to the public. VRO is named after the American astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who was the first to establish the presence of dark matter https://rubinobservatory.org/for-educators/glossary/dark-matter   due to her work involving galaxies. 

In a word as to VRO and its images, WOW! This ground based observatory located on a remote and high mountain top in Chile will have digital photographic and data set processing capabilities that no other telescope has.

Taking over 20 years to build at a cost of $800 million VRO boasts the largest digital camera in the world and is listed as such in the “Guinness Book of World Records”. With 3,200 megapixels and covering an area of the sky equivalent to 45 full moons for each image, it would require 4,000 4K TV sets to view the full image. Each night 20 terabytes of data is downloaded.

VRO can image the entire sky as seen from the observatory in just 3-4 nights and image objects like asteroids (VRO discovered 2,104 new asteroids in ten hours observing) and comets in our the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy and astronomical objects in our celestial neighborhood and much farther away. VRO will also help to study Dark Matter and  Dark Energy      https://rubinobservatory.org/news/unravel-mysteries-dark-universe .

With this groundbreaking and unique capability the primary goal of VRO and its mega camera is to conduct a ten-year study called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time https://rubinobservatory.org/explore/how-rubin-works/lsst to capture the changes that will take place each clear night across the sky. This treasure chest of imagery and data about our Universe will give the public - more on that to follow - and astronomers a “home movie” of our Universe. 

The night sky changes constantly from one night to the next. VRO will capture an estimated ten million changes each night in almost real time with 30-second exposures taken during the night’s observing run. 

Utilizing the enormous 8.4 meter primary mirror and unique three mirror optical design coupled with powerful data processing VRO can detect these changes and will issue alerts. 

As explained by VRO:

“To deal with this potentially-overwhelming alert stream, Rubin routes alerts to "brokers," who have developed software to categorize the alerts. So imagine you’re a scientist studying supernovae—thanks to the work of the alert brokers, you can log into the Rubin Science Platform to access Rubin data and filter the millions of alerts to study only the ones that were categorized as supernovae.”

I had two questions that I posed to the esteemed panel:

“What is the most anticipated discovery to be made by LSST?”

“What surprises await?”

The collective response was:

So, there are so many of them, it's hard to pick one. We will be looking for unknown unknowns.

But we also know some of the discoveries that will be made. I already mentioned earlier today, 5 million asteroids (will be discovered).

And not everything will be discovery. We are also doing precise measurements (trillions) in cosmology, in dark matter, dark energy.

Context will be (provided by) measuring things precisely. That's one of the goals.

We will get some unexpected discoveries, like, for example, interstellar objects https://rubinobservatory.org/news/visitors-from-distant-stars  .

We are now in position to get 10 or 15 of them, and get much better understanding. There are two that are known, Oumuamua and Borisov, so we will learn a lot.

Of course (there is the) survey. Prior to Ruben and LSST every big project that scanned the sky discovered many unexpected things. So, by that argument, we think we'll discover a lot. But then different people are excited about different things. One of them is the time domain context.

Dr. Federico Bianco, VRO Deputy Project Scientist had this to say:

Well, I'm gonna double down on the unknown unknowns.

I love the question, because can you tell us what the surprise is? No, it's a surprise. That's a bit tautological.

And it's really exciting that it is a surprise, and I want to emphasize how difficult it still is going to be to find those things that we have never seen before. Um, people make the analogy, it's like a needle in a haystack. It's not. It's a needle in a haystack if you don't know what the shape of the needle is, if you don't know what the color of the needle is, if you don't know whether the needle moves through the haystack, and if you don't know really what the haystack is composed of, because there's millions of things in the haystack, we don't know all of them to the same level of detail. So it's really an adventurous horizon, and yeah, I'm very glad that we can all answer the question what surprises there are going to be, because they're really surprising.

The public is invited to share in the discoveries by participating in a number of VRO research projects https://rubinobservatory.org/explore/citizen-science . You can also get a new U.S. Mint Vera Rubin Quarter https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/new-u-s-coin-honors-astronomer-vera-rubin/?utm_source=cc&utm_medium=newsletter .

Full operation at VRO is expected to commence in the next few months. 

Oh, the wonders and beauty we will see…..

SKY GUY IN VA