Podcster: Rob Sparks; Guest: Dr. Alan Strauss
Title: The Rubin Observatory First Look
Organization: NOIRLab
Links: https://www.facebook.com/NOIRLabAstro ; https://www.instagram.com/noirlabastro/ ; https://www.youtube.com/noirlabastro ; @NOIRLabAstro
NOIRLab Press Release:
NOIRLab First Look Press Release; Rubin Observatory; Rubin Education; Rubin Observatory First Look Press Conference; World Wide Telescope Interactive Version of First Images
Description: The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, released its first imagery at an event in Washington, D.C. The imagery shows cosmic phenomena captured at an unprecedented scale. In just over 10 hours of test observations, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory has already captured millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids.
The imagery is a small preview of Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year scientific mission to explore and understand some of the Universe’s biggest mysteries. In this podcast, Rubin Observatory’s Dr. Alan Strauss discusses the observatory, the first look images and how the public and students can interact with the data.
Bio: Rob Sparks is in the Communications, Education and Engagement group at NSF’s NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona
Dr. Alan Strauss is the Head of Education and Public Outreach (EPO), at the NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory, where he leads an interdisciplinary team of astronomers, writers, designers, educators, and developers building web-based astronomy experiences for students, teachers, and the general public.
Transcript:
[Rob Sparks]
It’s the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, coming in three, two, one. Hi, this is Rob Sparks of NSF’s Tomorrowlab, and I would like to welcome you to this episode of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. My guest today is Alan Strauss of the Rubin Observatory.
Good morning, Alan. How are you doing today? Good.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
How are you, Rob?
[Rob Sparks]
Great. We just had a big event we’re going to talk about in a couple minutes, but first, could you tell us about yourself and your role with the Rubin Observatory?
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
Sure. Yes, it was a huge week. It was our first look, so hopefully all of the listeners got a chance to see the amazing images from Rubin Observatory.
And my role is the head of education and outreach for the observatory, so I work with an amazing team across Rubin, across Noir Lab of, I don’t even know how many people, 30-plus people that worked really hard on this. And our role is to bring the excitement and the wonder and the science of Rubin Observatory to the world.
[Rob Sparks]
And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, the first look images from the Rubin Observatory, a major new ground-based facility. First, could you tell us about the major science goals of the Rubin Observatory?
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
Yeah, so the Rubin Observatory, first I want to say, is the first U.S.-funded, government-funded observatory named after a woman, Vera C. Rubin. So we say Rubin for short.
And the observatory was purpose-built around four science goals. And so the order that I’m going to share them with you is my own order. I wouldn’t say that one is, you know, the primary goal versus the other.
But the first of those is creating an inventory of the solar system. So Rubin is going to very quickly be scanning the sky relentlessly for 10 years, every night, 356 days a year or something. A few nights off, right, for maintenance and full moon and weather and things like that.
And it will identify most of the objects in the solar system. So right now we know of around a million, million and a quarter objects. Most of those, of course, asteroids.
And Rubin is going to push that inventory out to five, perhaps six million objects. So that’s one of the main science goals. And then expanding a little bit out from the solar system, I guess we could say expanding a lot out from the solar system, would be mapping the Milky Way.
So, you know, right now, you know, we were sitting in a galaxy that it’s hard to get a picture of because we’re inside of it. But astronomers have been taking images of the sky, surveying for a long time. And we have perhaps, you know, 2 billion stars, right, mapped in our catalogs.
And Rubin is going to push that to somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 million stars, right, most of those in our own galaxy. So we’re going to get a much more detailed map of our galaxy and begin to understand it better. It’s history, things like that.
So continuing to move out, right, the third science goal is to probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy. This actually is very interesting, because it is one of the bigger mysteries, right, in astronomy, one of the things we can get very excited about. Because 95% of the universe is stuff that we don’t know about yet, right?
We can only account for about 5% of the universe with the light that we see, with things we can measure. So 95% is still unaccounted for. And probing that dark energy, dark matter is one of the big goals of the observatory.
It’s also connected to Vera Rubin, as she was the first person to really provide convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter. And so what we’ll be doing is looking every night, again, for 10 years, and taking very, very deep images of the sky over those 10 years, very much like the first look images that hopefully the listeners all saw. And similar to the number of stars, right now we have a couple billion galaxies in our catalogs, Rubin will push that to on the order of 20 billion galaxies.
So it’s really exponential. And by stepping back and seeing a large scale structure, the forest rather than the trees, if you will, then we can begin to probe and explore what is the nature of dark matter and dark energy and its role in the universe. And then the fourth thing is that Rubin is designed to study the transient sky.
So things that move, things that change in brightness, things that were there or were not there previously, disappear, those kinds of things. So those are the four science goals.
[Rob Sparks]
So what makes this telescope, the Simoni Survey Telescope, well-suited to achieve these goals?
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
Yeah, that’s a very, very good question. Because in this case, the telescope was built to the science goals. Quite often in astronomy, we build a big telescope and it can do many, many things.
We attach different instruments to it. In this case, the idea of studying the nature of dark matter and dark energy, exploring the transient sky, things that change, creating a very, very wide field, deep map of the Milky Way drove the design of the telescope. And so the telescope has really three things going for it.
Well, it’s got a lot of things going for it, but three big ones. One is the camera. It’s the largest digital camera ever produced.
And the camera is 3.2 gigapixels. So that’s 3.2 billion pixels. And the field of view is about three and a half degrees.
And you could fit approximately 40 full moons in one image. So very, very wide. And the telescope is also very fast.
So it’s very fast optically. It’s an F1.2, I believe, system. And it is fast mechanically, if you will.
So maybe somebody would say it’s fast optomechanically. I don’t know. So it can move very, very quickly.
So it’ll take an image of the sky, the shutter will close, it’ll move to the next position, and the shutter will open in about five seconds. So everything stabilizes very, very quickly. So on an average night during the survey, we’ll get about 1,000 images a night.
And that’s what enables us to very quickly capture things that change in brightness, things that move, and also in 10 years build up the deepest map ever. So it’s got this very fast system. It’s got a very sensitive camera, and it’s a very wide field.
So those really are the things that make it suited. And in fact, we call the bulk of the survey area, the 10-year survey, the Wide, Fast, Deep area. And I should have mentioned, and I didn’t, that the survey is called the LSST, which is the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
So when you hear that acronym LSST, that’s the 10-year science mission that we’re going to begin later this year. And it will do this Wide, Fast, Deep of the entire southern sky. And then there are some areas where it’ll do what we call deep drilling.
So it’ll look a little more intensely in some fields. And then in others, like where the Milky Way is, there’ll be a different cadence. But again, in that 10 years, this will be the deepest look we’ve ever had.
[Rob Sparks]
But so all these things, the different cadences, the deep drilling, the different cadences in different parts of the sky are all optimized to achieve those science goals.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
Absolutely. And of course, it’ll be dynamic, right? You’re doing a survey.
You can’t account for clouds moving, things like that. So it’s not just a fully automated system. It is certainly an automated cadence, but there are observers every night who are monitoring that and making decisions about adjusting that to take advantage of conditions, of also what we call targets of opportunity.
So if something is discovered by, say, another observatory, and it’s a very high priority, we might interrupt the survey to follow up on that target of opportunity. So a gravitational wave detection is a good example. So if that came up, we are well suited as an observatory to quickly cover a large area of the sky and see if we can detect an optical counterpart to that.
[Rob Sparks]
And gravitational waves typically don’t have a very narrow cone in the sky they can isolate to. You have a fairly large area to have to search. Right.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
Rubin is very well suited to those follow-ups.
[Rob Sparks]
I was just thinking for a second, 40 full moons and 1,000 images, right? That’s 40,000 full moons per night of imaging area. Exactly.
Yeah.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
It’s a treasure trove of stuff, no doubt. For the people that are interested in the data, it’s about 20 terabytes a night of data. And over the 10-year survey, I believe the number is 60 petabytes, which is far more than has ever been collected in astronomy ever.
[Rob Sparks]
Rubin recently released its first images and data preview from the telescope. So what data has been released so far? And what are the highlights discoveries of this first look data?
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
Yeah. So first look is kind of a fun thing. First of all, I will say that we’re still commissioning the telescope.
So that survey, the LSST, will begin later this year. And the first look images, we spent some time during commissioning taking fields, imaging these areas of the sky specifically to put out these beautiful images and show people all of the scientific capabilities of the observatory. So those images, because we’re still commissioning, we’re not at the point of taking scientific grade data yet.
It’s very, very close to that. But we’re continuing to do the commissioning. So as you mentioned, we just released on Monday the 30th of June, Data Preview 1.
And so what that is, it’s a small set of data to the science community that they can begin to use to, of course, do research, but also get used to using our science platform and working with this incredibly rich Rubin data. In that data preview are approximately 2,000 exposures from the commissioning camera primarily, which was a smaller camera that was on the observatory before the LSST camera, which is the full size camera that we’re using for the survey. Those first look images were taken with the LSST camera.
The commissioning camera that I referred to is a much smaller sensor. And so that’s the data set that we just released. Every year, we will have an annual data release for the science community.
And that will be all of the images that are taken during the year added together so that they can see the full depth of many, many observations of every spot on the sky. In the interim, one of the other exciting things are what we call alerts. And so we’ll be scanning the sky relentlessly at this very fast cadence every night.
And we’re going to detect changes. We talked about that. That’s one of the main science goals.
So if something moves, something is changing in brightness, something appears, something disappears, a supernova, possible supernova candidate, for example. And so as this data comes off the camera, the shutter closes, takes about two seconds to read out. Within 10 seconds, that image is sitting at the U.S. Data Facility at Stanford University, the SLAC, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the National Lab there, who’s a partner in the observatory, just like NOIR Lab. And then the algorithms will look at this data, and they will put out alerts. And so these are very small packets of data that say, hey, here’s a possible asteroid, or here’s a possible supernova, or this is a known asteroid or a known supernova. Here’s something we have no idea about.
And then scientists, amateur astronomers, anybody in the world can subscribe to an alert stream through brokers. There are eight brokers that are working with Rubin data. So that will be public very, very quickly.
Within about two minutes of the shutter closing, those alerts will be going out to the brokers, which is fantastic. This capability to follow up on events has never been this fast before. I would be remiss if I didn’t share.
It is an unprecedented data set. We are anticipating that if we’re, say, looking in the plane of the Milky Way on a given night, we could have up to 10 million alerts that go out once we have a good template of the sky.
[Rob Sparks]
Wow, that’s a lot of alerts.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
It is. And then you also asked what has been discovered. And I got so excited about the alerts, I forgot about that.
[Rob Sparks]
The alerts are exciting. I get it. Yeah.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
So again, we were taking these images primarily to, or taking this data primarily to create images to share with the public, to show where we’re at and the power of Rubin Observatory to address these science goals. However, in the First Look stuff that people saw, we did share that in about 10 hours, looking in the southern part of the constellation Virgo, that we discovered a little bit over 2,000 new asteroids in those images. And so those have all now been reported to the Minor Planet Center.
And professional astronomers, amateur astronomers can get a hold of that data, do follow-up observations. So it’s, again, we know about a million, million and a quarter asteroids. Currently, Rubin’s going to push that to five or six million.
And you can see that just in 10 hours of observations.
[Rob Sparks]
So in the first 10 hours, you found a lot. Yeah. A couple thousand new discoveries.
Yeah. Well, you mentioned that you hinted this earlier about the education public outreach, and that’s an important part of the Rubin Observatory. So how can the public view and interact with the data in these images, and what resources are available for teachers and students?
Sure.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
Well, the low-hanging fruit, if you will, are going to be the pretty pictures, right, which are going to be available on our website, on social media. We have a really neat tool called Sky Viewer on the website, so people can look at the whole sky from Rubin. Once it’s in there, it’s not there yet because we haven’t started surveying.
But right now, you can see the first look image in there, the wide area in the Virgo cluster, about 25 degrees. And so you can explore that on your own, free form. You can also take guided tours.
So we’ll take you to some of the neat objects, merging galaxies, star clusters, things like that, and with a little bit of information. The other tools, I mentioned quickly that amateur astronomers, say, could subscribe to an alert stream. So astronomers, amateurs that have a small observatory will do that, and they will submit follow-up observations in support of research, right?
Take photometry of emerging supernova, or generate light curves of asteroids, or even help determine orbits of asteroids just by taking positional data on them. Another big effort of the public outreach team is that we’ve created a platform for the Rubin science community to very quickly establish citizen science projects in partnership with the Zooniverse, zooniverse.org. And so what we imagine is because of this huge volume of data, researchers are going to need the help of the collective brainpower of the world to very quickly go through this data, to classify objects, to look, say, hey, is this a weakly lensing galaxy system, right?
Is this an asteroid? Is this digital noise, right? So these projects will be ported very quickly to Zooniverse, and we’re hoping that the public will participate in those classifications.
Educators, right? We’re working with educators around the world, so we’ve created a set of what we call Rubin investigations. Rob, I think you’ve been involved with some of those.
Yes, I have. Yeah, and so those are designed for teachers to use in the classroom. They’re completely free.
There’s no software to download, no apps, anything like that. They’re all on the Rubin Observatory website. And they’re really designed for kind of advanced middle school through early undergraduate, and they teach astronomical concepts.
So teachers can go on and carry out these investigations with their students. There’s many, many resources to support the teachers. They’re all in English and about half of them are in Spanish right now.
Eventually, they’ll all be in Spanish. And once we have the data from the survey flowing, those investigations will have real Rubin data in them. So teachers and students around the world will get to engage with that data as they learn astronomical concepts, things like the electromagnetic spectrum or how the solar system works.
So it’s pretty exciting. I could go on all day about this, but I am conscious that a podcast is not supposed to be all day.
[Rob Sparks]
Well, that’s okay. This has been great, Alan. Thank you very much for joining me today.
I wish you the best of luck in the future with Rubin and look forward to working more with you on Rubin EPO in the future. Definitely.
[Dr. Alan Strauss]
And the last thing I’ll add is, I don’t know if I mentioned it, but the website is very simple. It’s RubinObservatory.org. And also follow us on the social media channels.
Just search for Rubin Observatory on Instagram or Facebook X, whatever you use. We definitely have a very active presence there, and it is also a nice way to engage. We respond to things.
[Rob Sparks]
And I’ll also just let people know they can look in the show notes. I will provide links to these sites in the show notes as well. So thank you for joining me today, Alan.
It was great. This is Rob Sparks signing off this episode of the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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