Observing millions of astronomical events as they unfold

UK scientists open a real-time window to our vast and ever-changing Universe.

UK astronomers are providing public real-time updates on the changes in our Universe, be it exploding stars, belching black holes, or asteroids cruising through our solar system.

The UK-developed software system, Lasair, has been created by a team from the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University Belfast, and the University of Oxford, to filter millions of events from the Rubin Observatory alerts stream, unlocking new scientific opportunities faster than ever before.

More than a decade in development, Lasair is one of a handful of Rubin data brokers. As a specialist in detecting transient events, it will uncover explosions of stars in distant galaxies that can tell us about the origin of the elements, the expansion of the Universe and the complex physics of black holes.

Lasair will ingest, process, and filter millions of astronomical alerts from the data that Rubin will capture during its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). This will enable scientists to focus on significant changes in the sky, from supernovae, variable stars, and gamma-ray bursts to black holes eating stars, and asteroids in the Solar System.

The first Rubin Observatory alerts distributed to researchers around the world were generated the night of 24 February. The alerts contained the flares of new supernovae and the flickers of stars, actively feeding black holes in distant galaxies, and asteroids cruising through our Solar System.

A deluge of data

Every night, powerful computers in the UK will help to crunch the huge influx of data captured by the world’s largest digital camera before serving it up to the science community through the Lasair web portal. The computers that run Lasair are part of a wider data facility constructed on IRIS, a network of powerful, digital research infrastructure for priority astronomy, particle physics, and nuclear physics in the UK. It provides the technology that astronomers around the world will use to unlock the secrets from Rubin. Over the next 10 years, UK scientists will use powerful supercomputers to analyse around 10 million images, captured by the Observatory as part of LSST, identifying and measuring billions of stars and galaxies – most of which have never previously been detected.

Dr Roy Williams of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh has been the lead developer for Lasair for over a decade. He said:

Lasair is a platform to enable custom filtering: each user imagines and creates their own filter. Most nights there will be a massive flow of data that Lasair will strain through those filters, and we hope this flexibility will allow users to find new and unexpected discoveries from this glorious deluge.

Sophisticated software

Professor Bob Mann, Professor of Survey Astronomy at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, is the Project Leader for UK participation in the Rubin LSST. He said:

The Lasair alert broker is one of the important contributions that UK astronomers are making to the Rubin LSST. Over the course of a decade, the Lasair team have used data from simulations and a precursor sky survey to develop a sophisticated system that will enable astronomers to detect instances of rare time-varying celestial phenomena of different kinds within the deluge of data that will flow from Rubin. Today marks a major milestone for them and the start of an exciting decade of science for astronomers in the UK and beyond.

Lasair is part of a multi-million-pound investment by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which is enabling the UK to participate in the groundbreaking Rubin LSST. Across 36 research institutions in the UK, researchers and software developers are addressing scientific and technical challenges that will enable astronomers to make discoveries within the multi-Petabyte dataset that will be captured by the Rubin Observatory over the next 10 years.

The beginning of scientific alerts is one of the last major milestones before Rubin Observatory begins its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) this year.