The “Cosmic Movie” has begun
Astronomers in Edinburgh join colleagues around the world celebrating the start of the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
The night of 29 June saw the start of the Rubin LSST, an astronomical sky survey that has been dubbed “the cosmic movie” because of the unprecedented time-resolved view of the Universe that it will provide.
For the next ten years, the LSST will capture the entire southern sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe. This movie will help us solve some of the Universe’s biggest mysteries – such as the nature of dark energy, and the evolution of the solar system, Milky Way, and galaxies across cosmic time.
As a major international partner of the US-led Rubin Observatory, UK’s involvement is facilitated through a multi-million-pound investment by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Formed in 2014, the LSST:UK Consortium is made up of 36 partner institutions representing all major UK astronomy research groups. Researchers and software developers across the UK are addressing scientific and technical challenges posed by this revolutionary observatory.
During its 10-year survey, Rubin will catalogue an estimated 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies, plus millions of events that change in the sky each night. With the survey expected to create up to 500 petabytes of data in its lifetime, the UK is playing a significant role in the management and processing of this unprecedented dataset. The UK's LSST data facility will process 25% of the data from Rubin, turning raw images of the sky into the calibrated data products with which astronomers can do science, and will operate an Edinburgh-based data centre capable of supporting analysis of those data products by 20% of the international LSST community.
The Edinburgh data centre also hosts the Lasair event broker, a sophisticated software system supporting the near-real-time analysis of the alerts that Rubin issues whenever it detects a moving or time-varying celestial source. This alert stream - which can comprise millions of alerts per night and which includes a wide range of astrophysical objects, from nearby asteroids to distant supernovae - started flowing in February, ahead of today's formal start of the 10-year LSST.
Professor Bob Mann, Professor of Survey Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, is the Project Leader for UK participation in the Rubin LSST: He said:
Today marks the start of the 10-year LSST, but it is more like the mid-point of our UK project. Researchers in the UK have been preparing for more than a decade for the data that is starting to flow today and the contributions we are making will enhance the science that can be done with it over the coming decade or more by astronomers around the world.
Professor Grahame Blair, Executive Director of Programmes at STFC, said:
Today marks the beginning of a new era in astronomy. Together with our partners, UK scientists, engineers and software experts, STFC is excited to be part of one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken. The discoveries made over the next decade will inspire future generations, deepen our understanding of the cosmos, and reinforce the UK's position at the forefront of astronomical research.