The Vera C. Rubin Observatory spent the night staring at the dark cosmos, alerting astronomers of ongoing changes in the skies in real-time.<\/p>\n
The observatory fired off its first wave of notifications from its new alert system on Tuesday night, sending 800,000 alerts to astronomers\u2019 computers around the world. The Alert Production Pipeline, a software developed at the University of Washington, is designed to eventually produce up to 7 million alerts per night, documenting celestial events spotted by Rubin.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe scale and speed of the alerts are unprecedented,\u201d Hsin-Fang Chiang, a software developer at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and lead of operations for data processing at the U.S. Data Facility, said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cAfter generating hundreds of thousands of test alerts in the last few months, we are now able to say, within minutes, with each image, \u2018Here is everything. Go.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n You up? <\/p>\n Nearly two decades in the making, the Rubin Observatory boasts the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and an ultra-sensitive 28-foot (8.4-meter) primary mirror. The telescope\u2019s alert system notifies astronomers of interesting astronomical events within two minutes of their discovery, allowing them enough time to request follow-up observations for a closer look.<\/p>\n \u201cBy connecting scientists to a vast and continuous stream of information, NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will make it possible to follow the universe\u2019s events as they unfold, from the explosive to the most faint and fleeting,\u201d Luca Rizzi, a program director for research infrastructure at the National Science Foundation, said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n The first batch of notifications included detections of supernovae, variable stars, active galactic nuclei, and newly spotted asteroids in the solar system. Each alert signals something that has changed in a patch of the night skies since Rubin last looked, whether it\u2019s a new source of light, a star that brightened or dimmed, or an object that moved.<\/p>\n A team of researchers and software developers has been working on the Alert Production Pipeline for the past decade, trying to figure out how to process 10 terabytes of images every night. \u201cEnabling real-time discovery on such a massive data stream has required years of technical innovation in image processing algorithms, databases and data orchestration,\u201d Eric Bellm, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, who leads the Alert Production Pipeline Group for the Rubin Observatory, said in a statement.<\/p>\n Skygazing <\/p>\n The launch of Rubin\u2019s alert system precedes the telescope\u2019s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will launch later this year. During the upcoming 10-year-long survey, Rubin will generate a wide-field snapshot of the southern sky every few nights.<\/p>\n As the telescope captures views of the cosmos at unprecedented depths, the alerts will keep astronomers in the loop of the treasure trove of discoveries in real time. \u201cRubin Observatory\u2019s groundbreaking capabilities are revealing untold astrophysical treasures and expanding scientists\u2019 access to the ever-changing cosmos,\u201d Kathy Turner, program manager in the High Energy Physics program in the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Office of Science, said in a statement.<\/p>\n