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Geek Wire
a day ago
- Science
- Geek Wire
University of Washington celebrates Rubin Observatory's debut — and looks ahead
University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic talks about the Rubin Observatory — a project in which he played a leading role — with an image of the facility displayed behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) It's been more than two decades since the University of Washington helped kick off the effort to get the Vera C. Rubin Observatory built in Chile — and now that it's finished, UW astronomers are gearing up to get in on the first decade of discoveries. The university's role in the past, present and future of the Rubin Observatory and its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, literally took center stage in front of a packed house at UW's Kane Hall on Thursday night. UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, who served as director of Rubin construction and is shifting his focus to his role as head of science operations for LSST, recalled the night of April 15, when Rubin's first test images came in for fine tuning. 'We were all so happy, and we are still happy,' he said. 'We had been dreaming about this night for two decades, and it finally arrived. And not only that, we quickly obtained beautiful data, but also we continued to do so, and every new image was better and better. The observatory is performing beyond all our expectations.' Ivezic showed off the images of swirling galaxies and colorful nebulas that he first unveiled earlier in the week at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. And he talked up an online tool called Skyviewer that allows users to click around the observatory's 3,200-megapixel images and zoom in on details. 'It's an easy-to-use app,' he told the audience. 'When you go home tonight, then you can spend the next few hours just going around. Turn off the light in your room and then look at your screen, and it will be fantastic.' University of Washington Zeljko Ivezic shows off his Rubin Observatory necktie and matching nail polish. The tie is on sale via the Startorialist website. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) The University of Washington's involvement in the Rubin Observatory goes back to the early 2000s, when astronomers began considering how a next-generation sky survey might be accomplished. In its early years, the project was known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (which set the precedent for the LSST acronym). UW was one of four founding partners of the LSST Corporation, an entity that was set up to get the project started. (That nonprofit group, which was subsequently renamed the LSST Discovery Alliance, now has 40 member institutions.) In 2008, the project got a huge boost from Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi — who donated $10 million and $20 million, respectively, to support early work on the telescope's 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror. As the years went on, support for the project grew, fueled by a high rating in the National Research Council's 2010 Decadal Survey. Eventually, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for building the observatory in Chile, where dry air and dark skies made for optimal viewing conditions. In 2019, the observatory was officially named in honor of astronomer Vera Rubin, who analyzed galactic rotation rates to nail down the first convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter. The survey telescope, meanwhile, was named after Simonyi's family in recognition of his early gift. Today, UW's Rubin Observatory team consists of about 75 faculty members and graduate students, plus scores of undergraduates. University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, the team's principal investigator, noted that UW played an essential role in getting the observatory up and running. 'None of this would be possible without the Rubin team right here at UW,' he told Thursday night's audience. Members of the University of Washington's team for the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time pose for a group picture after a presentation at UW's Kane Hall. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) That essential role will continue into the next decade. In partnership with Princeton University, UW's team is responsible for the software that processes the trillions of bytes of image data that are generated by the observatory on a nightly basis. That work meshes with the leading roles in Rubin operations that are performed by the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. 'We're here to figure out how to build algorithms to get the most out of data, how to make the software work as well as it can,' Juric told GeekWire. Andrew Connolly, another UW astronomer who is the director of the university's eScience Institute, said the university's researchers are relying on machine learning and other artificial intelligence strategies 'to accelerate our discoveries.' 'We build AI that allows us to study the variability in time series data. We build new tools at U Dub to search for the signatures of a distant planet in the outskirts of our solar system,' he said. 'We even use AI to improve the image quality and the sharpness of the images that you see.' Astronomers expect the data from Rubin to reveal millions of previously undetected asteroids in our own solar system, shed light on the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, track phenomena including gamma-ray bursts and supernovas, and capture images of billions of galaxies repeatedly over the coming decade. James Davenport — who is the newly named director of the university's DiRAC Institute, taking a handoff from Juric — said it's going to be an exciting 10 years. 'We are going to discover things we don't expect,' he said.
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Science
- Boston Globe
Vera Rubin scientists reveal telescope's first images
Over the next decade, the imagery will be patched together to create 'the greatest movie of all time,' Ivezić said. The observatory, named after astronomer Vera Rubin, is a joint venture of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. It was built on a mountain in northern Chile in the foothills of the Andes at the edge of the Atacama Desert. The location, high and dry, provides clear skies for observing the cosmos. At the news conference Monday, Ivezić explained that part of Rubin's powerful capability was that its singular data set would serve many different science goals. Advertisement The observatory's treasure trove of data will allow astronomers to investigate dark energy, a force pushing the universe to expand ever faster, as well as dark matter, a mysterious substance that behaves somewhat like galactic glue. Closer to Earth, it will identify asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth. When asked about what surprises might be hiding in the data, Federica Bianco, Rubin's deputy project scientist, said that these were unknown unknowns. 'It's really an adventurous horizon,' she said. Advertisement Two of the first images show snippets of the Virgo Cluster, a group of galaxies some 65 million light-years away. In the foreground are bright stars that lie within our Milky Way galaxy. In the background are many extremely distant galaxies, with a reddish hue, because in an expanding universe, distant objects are moving away at high speeds. In the middle are galaxies within the Virgo cluster. The blue dots within galaxies are star-forming regions with younger, hotter stars. But each snippet shared Monday is but a tiny piece of the full image produced by the telescope. The level of detail in the Rubin images is impossible to convey on a computer screen or a newspaper page. As a result, the Rubin team has developed Skyviewer, which lets people zoom in and out of the giant images. 'We needed to make dynamic ways to share the data,' Steven Ritz, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the project scientist for Rubin construction, said in an interview. 'We knew the images were so big that if you zoomed all the way out, it would kind of look like porridge. You wouldn't see the richness. You had to be able to zoom in.' With Skyviewer, anyone can carry the cosmos around on a smartphone. 'You can have 6 billion pixels in your pocket,' Ritz said. 'It's really cool.' Most of the celestial objects do not yet have names, because they are being viewed for the first time. The software tool allows one to hear the images too. 'We built in an ability to interact, to experience the data, not with your eyes, but with your ears,' Ritz said. 'That matters to some people who, of course, only have a capability with their ears. But I think it's valuable for everybody.' Advertisement Ivezić also showed streaks of asteroids photo-bombing the cosmic images. The observatory's software automatically removes them from pictures of the distant universe. It also calculates orbits of the asteroids. In just a few nights of observations, it discovered 2,104 new asteroids. Seven of them are near-Earth asteroids, although none are on a collision course with Earth. The rest are in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Another image showed a riotously pink view of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas. The two sprawling clouds of dust and gas, thousands of light-years away from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, have been photographed often by both amateurs and professional astronomers. More powerful instruments have taken more detailed photos, but with their narrow field of view, they only see a small slice of the scene. The blue regions are lit up by light from young, hot stars and scattered by dust, said Clare Higgs, an outreach specialist working for Rubin. The pinkish colors most likely come from emissions of excited hydrogen atoms, and the dark tendrils are lanes of dust. Construction of the Rubin Observatory began a decade ago. The completed telescope recorded its first bits of light on April 15. Rubin is far from the largest telescope in the world, but it is a technological marvel. The main structure of the telescope, with a 28-foot-wide primary mirror, an 11-foot-wide secondary mirror and the world's largest digital camera, floats on a thin layer of oil. Magnetic motors twirl the 300-ton structure around -- at full speed, it could complete one full rotation in a little more than half a minute. Advertisement Its unique design means Rubin can gaze deep, wide and fast, allowing the telescope to quickly pan across the sky, taking some 1,000 photos per night. By scanning the entire sky every three to four days for 10 years, it will discover millions of exploding stars, space rocks flying past and patches of warped space-time that produce distorted, fun-house views of distant galaxies. 'You've not seen the whole thing, all captured at once at this depth with so many objects there,' Ritz said. 'That, I would point out, is new. And just how pretty it is.' This article originally appeared in
