Bang! Whiz! Pop! The universe is a happening place—full of exploding stars, erupting black holes, zipping asteroids, and much more. And astronomers have a brand-new, superpowerful eye with which to see the changing cosmos: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
The Rubin Observatory released its first images last week, and they’re stunning—vast, glittering star fields that show off the telescope’s massive field of view and spectacularly deep vision. But two of the endeavor’s most compelling aspects are difficult to convey in any individual image, no matter how spectacular: the sheer amount of data Rubin will produce and the speed with which those data will flood into astronomers’ work.
“We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears,” says Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin’s deputy associate director for data management. Any time something happens in Rubin’s expansive view, the observatory will automatically alert scientists who may be interested in taking a closer look. The experience will be like receiving personalized notifications from the universe.\
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