The Vera Rubin Observatory Is Set to Revolutionise Our Exploration of the Universe

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory — a collaboration between the United States and Chile — is home to the 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope, which will begin its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the end of this year. The production of the telescope’s primary mirror was launched in 2008, thanks to a major financial donation from Charles Simonyi, the Hungarian-born software pioneer who has travelled to space twice. The observatory is located in Chile at an altitude of 2,680 metres. The soon-to-be-operational telescope houses the world’s largest digital camera, with a 3,200-megapixel sensor — the equivalent of 400 ultra-HD displays — capable of capturing a sky area equal to 49 full Moons in a single exposure.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will provide the most detailed view to date of both nearby and distant cosmic objects — and how they change over time. It will record everything out of the ordinary: the motion of Solar System objects, the brightening and dimming of stars, supernova explosions, and other cosmic cataclysms. Each night, the system will issue 10 million alerts about changes detected in the sky — all within 60 seconds of capturing the image. These alerts will be fully public.

The “colour time-lapse movie”, captured in six optical bands, will generate a previously unimaginable volume of data. By the end of the ten-year programme, a total of 500 petabytes will have been collected. For comparison, the LSST will record 20 terabytes of data each night, whereas the Hubble Space Telescope captures around 2 gigabytes and the James Webb Space Telescope around 57 gigabytes. This illustrates the scale and efficiency of one of the most important ground-based astrophysical observation programmes of the decade: in the time it takes someone to turn on their phone and take a photo, the LSST will have imaged 100,000 galaxies — most of them never observed before.

Named after the pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin — who passed away in 2016 and played a key role in the discovery of dark matter — the observatory is set to revolutionise astronomy in several key areas: the study of the dark universe, including dark matter and dark energy; mapping the Milky Way; investigating variable stars and stellar explosions such as novae, supernovae, and other transient astrophysical objects; and surveying small bodies in the Solar System — including comets arriving from other star systems and near-Earth asteroids.

Hungarian involvement:

Hungarian researchers will gain access to LSST data through an in-kind contribution. As part of this, they will support the full utilisation and processing of the data by developing software in several areas — including the AI-based classification of variable stars, the study of faint comets and asteroids, and the compilation of galaxy catalogues.

In return, researchers at the HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, the Institute of Physics and Astronomy at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), and ELTE’s Gothard Astrophysical Observatory in Szombathely will be able to participate in research related to cosmology, the Solar System, astrophysical transients, variable stars, and galactic archaeology. The LSST international collaboration includes around 4,000 researchers and engineers worldwide.

The Hungarian-language live broadcast — featuring expert commentary and following the Washington press conference unveiling the first LSST images — can be rewatched at the YouTube link below:

About the cover image:

This image perfectly illustrates Rubin’s unique features: its extremely wide field of view and its ability to capture a large number of high-resolution images in a short time. Combining these images reveals fine structures within the clouds of gas and dust.

This nearly 5-gigapixel image was created by combining 678 exposures taken over just 7.2 hours of observing time. In total, approximately two trillion pixels of data were processed to assemble the final image. No other observatory can match this combination of speed, depth, and sky coverage. (Credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA)