The Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST

A new, transformational observatory is about to start building a legacy for humanity vith a movie of the night sky

just as human-made satellites are about to forever change it

A new, transformational observatory is about to start building a legacy for humanity vith a movie of the night sky

what's in a name?

The first ground-based national US observatory named after a woman, Dr. Vera C. Rubin

what's in a name?

what's in a name?

The first ground-based national US observatory named after a woman, Dr. Vera C. Rubin

“The most important feature of any telescope is the imagination with which it is used.”

LSST:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time

20Tb of data every night. That is equivalent to

8,000 high definition movies

4,000 hours of tiktok videos

every night for 10 years

8,000 high definition movies

4,000 hours of tiktok videos

every night for 10 years

LSST:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time

20Tb of data every night. That is equivalent to

A legacy dataset that belongs to all people in the USA giving access to never before seen corners of the Universe to all

LSST:

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time

20Tb of data every night.

Probing Dark Energy and Dark Matter

image credit ESO-Gaia

Mapping the Milky Way and Local Volume

17Billion stars in the milky way: color, position, motion, and variability

An unprecedented inventory of the Solar System

from threatening asteroids to the distant Oort Cloud

image credit: ESA-Justyn R. Maund

Exploring the Transients and Variable Universe

10M alerts every night shared with the world

60 seconds after observation

The immutable skies

Bartolomeu Velho, 1568 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

1549 Oronce Fine, France

From Flammarion's Astronomie Populaire (1880): in Scania, Denmark

Henry III, Tivoli, SN 1054, unknown artist, ca.1450

TED talk - Andrew Connely

←Dimmer Brighter →

0.01 0.1 1 10 100

stellar sexplosions

stellar eruptions

stellar variability

←Dimmer Brighter →

0.01 0.1 1 10 100

To accomplish this, we need:

Objective: to provide a science-ready dataset to transform the 4 key science area

To accomplish this, we need:

1) Dark Skies - Cerro Pachon Chile

Objective: to provide a science-ready dataset to transform the 4 key science area

To accomplish this, we need:

1) Dark skies - Cerro Pachon Chile

2) a large telescope mirror to be sensitive - 8m (6.7m)

Objective: to provide a science-ready dataset to transform the 4 key science area

May 2022 - Telescope Mount Assembly

3.2 Gigapixels:

We built the largest (declassified) camera ever built

to look farther and wider into the sky than ever before

In 2026 we will begin observing the sky with 1000 images every night for 10 years

How do we study stellar explosions?

with this much data we need Artificial Intelligence

in 60 seconds:

Difference Image Analysis

template

in 60 seconds:

Difference Image Analysis

template

difference image

in 60 seconds:

Difference Image Analysis

template

difference image

Rubin Observatory Data Management Team

federica bianco - fbianco@udel.edu

To accomplish this, we need:

1) Dark skies - Cerro Pachon

2) a large telescope mirror to be sensitive - 8m (6.7m)

3) a large field-of-view for sky-scanning speed - 10 deg2

4) high spatial resolution, high quality images - 0.2''/pixels

5) process images in realtime to produce 10M nightly alerts and offline to produce and catalogs of all 37B objects

Objective: to provide a science-ready dataset to transform the 4 key science area

1996-1998 Tony Tyson, Roger Angel

2008

2017

Are We There YET????!!!!

Eye to the sky…on-sky engineering tests have begun at @nsfgov–@energy Rubin Observatory using the world’s largest digital camera!🔭

April 17 2025

Eye to the sky…on-sky engineering tests have begun at

Rubin Observatory using the world’s largest digital camera!

June 23 2025

678 separate images taken in just over seven hours of observing time. Trifid nebula (top right) and the Lagoon nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth. | NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Why do we study stellar explosions?

10 stars explode in the universe every second

Until the 1900s we would see 1 in a century

Until the 1980s we would see 1 in a decade

Until the 2010s we would see 1 in a month

With the Vera C. Rubin Observatory we will see 1000 every night !

+ ~40 other authors

17B Stars (x10) Ivezic+19

20B Galaxies (x10) Ivezic+19

>1M supernovae (stellar explosions)

~50 kilonovae (today 2) Setzer+19, Andreoni+19

>= 10 Interstellar Objects (today 2....

3 !)

Grad student

Postdoc

Why do we study stellar explosions?

we are made of stars

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.

We are made of starstuff.

― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Farthest: 10.5 billion years ago

3 billion years after the Big Bang

redshift 4

Why do we study stellar explosions?

they are the best tool to "measure" the Universe

largest explosion on earth 10,000,000 erg

typical supernova....

Why do we study stellar explosions?

a unique opportunity to study extreme energy events

who'sploded?

Scanning the sky repeatedly in 6 colors

7% of LSST data

Boone 2017

7% of LSST data

The rest

visualizatoin and concept credit: Alex Razim

Neural processes replaces the imposed kernel with a learned model: an artificial neural network

AI approaches to sparse sampling

Siddharth Chaini, FINESST NASA fellow

k(x_i, x_j) = \frac{1}{\Gamma(\nu)2^{\nu-1}}\left( \frac{\sqrt{2\nu}}{l} d(x_i , x_j ) \right)^\nu K_\nu\left( \frac{\sqrt{2\nu}}{l} d(x_i , x_j )\right)\\ \nu=5/2

Can we study unusual SNe with Rubin data alone?

Data Driven Templates for rare classes of supernovae arising from massive stars: can we tell them apart from sparse LSST data lightcurves?

Creating templates from over 1000 photometry of "Stripped Envelope" Supernovae

Dr. Somayeh Khakpash

Khakpash+ 2024

Multi-city Urban Observatory Network

Studying cities as complex systems through imaging data

Multi-city Urban Observatory Network

Dobler, Bianco, et al 2021, in Remote Sensing

Studying cities as complex systems through imaging data

energy demand and consumption
ecology of flora and fauna
urban metabolism
circadiem rhythms

Multi-city Urban Observatory Network

Testing the performance of MetaAI SAM on astronomical objects

Instead of building our own specialized AI, can we adapt the models that the industry produces?

That would save a lot of computational resources and computational resources have an environmental footprint!

Award #2123264

Rodiat Ayinde and Tatiana Acero Cuellar are applying the computer vision models they developed for astronomy to geography

What's even harder to study than stellar explosions?

Shar Daniels is a NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

They use telescopes and cameras in innovative ways to show the stars in their time evolution at milliseconds rate

and uses cutting edge AI (transformers) to discover new physical phenomena

NSF Graduate Research

Fellowship Program

time: 1 pixel = 3.0 milliseconds

space: 1 pixel = 1 arcsecond

What's even harder to study than stellar explosions?

Any phenomenon that changes rapidly, in less than hours, is a technological challenge in astronomy

What's even harder to study than stellar explosions?

Stellar flares are short lived (~minutes) brightening events caused by magnetic reconnections in stars' atmospheres. Stellar flare impact planetary habitability. Fast and unpredictable, they are hard to study and their physical properties, like temperature, are poorly constrained.