said<\/a> Luca Rizzi, a program director for research infrastructure at NSF. <\/p>\nA 10-Year Movie Of The Universe<\/p>\n
Formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the observatory will soon begin its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Its mission is to create a detailed time-lapse of the Southern Hemisphere sky by imaging it entirely every three to four nights for 10 years.<\/p>\n
At the heart of the project is the Simonyi Survey Telescope. An 8.4-meter (27.6-foot) primary mirror with a field of view about as wide as seven full moons, it’s designed for sweeping, repeated sky surveys \u2014 effectively producing a high-resolution astronomical movie rather than close-ups. <\/p>\n
In its first year alone, the observatory is expected to capture more images of the universe than all previous optical observatories combined.<\/p>\n
Finished LSST Camera.<\/p>\n
Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell\/SLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryLargest Digital Camera Ever Built<\/p>\n
Powering the mission is the 3,200-megapixel LSST Camera \u2014 the largest digital camera ever constructed for astronomy. The instrument contains 189 individual 16-megapixel sensors arranged across a 2-foot-wide focal plane and uses six massive optical filters to observe the universe in different wavelengths of light.<\/p>\n
Every 39 to 40 seconds, the telescope slews to a new position in just five seconds and captures another enormous image. Critical to the alert system are fiber-optic cables that transmit the data to a supercomputing facility in California, where software compares each new image with a reference template, instantly identifying anything that has changed \u2014 whether a brightening star, a supernova flare or an asteroid appearing.<\/p>\n
Those changes generate global alerts, enabling scientists to conduct time-sensitive follow-up observations with other ground- and space-based telescopes.<\/p>\n
This compilation contains five examples of Rubin alerts for supernovae. The images were captured during commissioning with the LSST Camera.<\/p>\n
NSF\u2013DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory\/NOIRLab\/SLAC\/AURA Acknowledgement: Alert images with classifications provided by ALeRCE and LasairAsteroids To Dark Matter<\/p>\n
The Rubin Observatory comes with huge expectations. In the short term, it\u2019s expected to detect about 90% of potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140 meters that could approach Earth within seven million kilometers. It will also likely find more interstellar comets (such as 3I\/ATLAS), rogue planets, variable stars and millions of supernovae. The enormous dataset will also map billions of galaxies, helping scientists probe the nature of dark matter \u2014 first discovered by astronomer Vera Rubin, for whom it\u2019s named. <\/p>\n
\u201cEnabling real-time discovery on 10 terabytes of images nightly has required years of technical innovation in image processing algorithms, databases, and data orchestration,\u201d said Eric Bellm, Alert Production Pipeline Group Lead for Rubin Data Management from NSF NOIRLab and the University of Washington. \u201cWe can\u2019t wait to see the exciting science that comes from these data.\u201d <\/p>\n
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"View of Vera C. Rubin Observatory beneath the glittering band of the Milky Way. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[72756,14804,255516,24382,305,64,63,255517,93033,128,4940,18830],"class_list":["post-509434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-72756","tag-3i-atlas","tag-255516","tag-asteroids","tag-astronomy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-new-telescope","tag-rubin","tag-science","tag-stargazing","tag-vera-c-rubin-observatory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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