The New Vera C. Rubin Observatory Is a Firehose of Astronomical Imagery & Data

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational and will soon embark on its primary mission: to take a detailed image of the sky every night for the next ten years.

A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing off what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomers study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years.

“As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story. And what astronomy has given us mostly so far are just snapshots,” says Yusra AlSayyad, a Princeton University researcher who oversees image processing for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

“The sky and the world aren’t static,” she points out. “There’s asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding.”

And the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, conceived nearly 30 years ago, is designed to capture all of it.

These images will revolutionize how astronomy is done:

Astronomy is following in the path of scientific fields like biology, which today is awash in DNA sequences, and particle physics, in which scientists must sift through torrents of debris from particle collisions to tease out hints of something new.

“We produce lots of data for everyone,” said William O’Mullane, the associate director for data management at the observatory. “So this idea of coming to the telescope and making your observation doesn’t exist, right? Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.”

“Your observation was made already. You just have to find it.” I love that.

The Rubin team has released some images from the telescope’s initial run, to inform the public of what the project is capable of. In less than a half-day’s operation, the Rubin discovered 2,104 new asteroids in our solar system.

In about 10 hours of observations, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory discovered 2104 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System, including seven near-Earth asteroids (which pose no danger). Annually, about 20,000 asteroids are discovered in total by all other ground and space-based observatories. Rubin Observatory alone will discover millions of new asteroids within the first two years of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Rubin will also be the most effective observatory at spotting interstellar objects passing through the Solar System.

Not bad, rook. The team has set up a dedicated image viewer for their massive images.

You can read more about the Rubin at The Atlantic, The Rubin Observatory Is a Cosmic Cathedral, written by Michael Jones McKean, the observatory’s artist in residence:

Rubin is also a rare scientific megaproject that feels excitingly relatable. Instruments such as particle accelerators, neutrino detectors, and even radio telescopes might command our awe, but they roam in realms far outside sensorial experience. At its core, Rubin is an optical telescope. This links it to a long continuum of prosthetic tools that help our bodies better do what they already do naturally — see and process light.

And a trio of videos on how the observatory works from BBC News, New Scientist, and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

• astronomy
• photography
• Rubin Observatory
• science
• telescopes

There Are Way More Rogue Planets Than We Thought

The galaxy is wild. Our solar system, with its surprising abundance of living creatures and nonstop radiation and asteroid showers, is a placid, private garden compared to the rest of it.

In particular, there are perhaps trillions of rogue planets (planetary bodies ranging from little rocky Earth-sized guys to super-Jupiter gas giants) in the Milky Way, including a surprisingly large fleet of the things right near the galactic core.

This is unusual, since the typical way we detect exoplanets is by marking their repeated procession across a star. But rogue planets, by definition, don’t orbit stars. So the way astronomers find them is a little different, requiring use of gravitational microlensing.

Gizmodo breaks it down:

Data gathered by NASA’s now-retired Kepler Space Telescope has revealed a small population of free-floating planets near the Galactic Bulge. The new finding raises hope that a pair of upcoming missions will result in further detections of unbound planets, which drift through space separated from their home stars….

It’s impossible to know what the conditions are like on these presumed rogue exoplanets, but [astronomer Iain] McDonald said they could be “cold, icy wastelands,” and, if similar in size to Earth, their surfaces would “closely resemble bodies in the outer Solar System, like Pluto.”

The new paper suggests the presence of a large population of Earth-sized rogue planets in the Milky Way. It’s becoming clear that free-floating planets are common. McDonald said his team is currently working to come up with a more precise estimate for how many of them might exist.

Did you catch that part about how McDonald’s team made this discovery using a now-retired telescope? Yeah. Apparently the new telescope projects coming online are both more powerful and (in particular) better equipped to detect gravitational lensing effects, and therefore more likely to detect rogue planets in the future.

• planets
• space
• telescopes

Scientists want to build an array of

Scientists want to build an array of submillimeter telescopes across the whole earth to peer “inside” the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Update: Many people wrote in to correct me in saying that “submillimeter” referred to the size of the telescopes…it of course referred to the EM wavelength. Me brain not working right.

• astronomy
• black holes
• physics
• science
• telescopes