The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new scientific facility jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, released its first imagery at an event in Washington, D.C., on June 23. The imagery shows cosmic phenomena captured at an unprecedented scale.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) hosted a watch party for the image reveal. Professional astronomers and researchers from the Laboratory - including some who designed components of the telescope and developed methods to analyze the huge amount of data it will produce - and curious community members attended.
In just over 10 hours of test observations, NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory has already captured millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids. The imagery is a small preview of Rubin Observatory's upcoming 10-year scientific mission to explore and understand some of the Universe's biggest mysteries.
The images, captured with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera, or LSST Cam, contain so much detail that the human eye cannot see every feature with a standard screen. To show every detail of a Rubin image at once would require a screen the size of a basketball court. Instead, the Rubin team used video to zoom in and out and show the incredible features in each image.
"One of my favorite facts about this telescope is that if it were any bigger, you couldn't do the survey because every pixel would be filled with a galaxy," said LLNL scientist Michael Schneider, who will use LSST data to make measurements of dark energy.
Megan Eckart, director of the LLNL Space Science Institute, emphasized how the Laboratory has played a role in this effort for many years.
"It was inspiring to be in the room today with some of the people whose years of work - on the camera and science preparation - made this achievement possible," she said. "Rubin's capabilities are unparalleled, and these first images are really striking."
LLNL's Brian Bauman was one of those people. As an optical engineer, he described himself as a caretaker of LSST's optical design.
"I started working on this project about 15 years ago, and I worked on it for five to seven years, part time, but pretty steadily," he said. "It's nice to see projects that take so long finally come to fruition."
Nathan Golovich, an astrophysicist at LLNL who attended the watch party, is excited about the sheer amount of data that LSST will produce.
"In graduate school, I did wide-field surveys of deep space and galaxy clusters. I remember how much time it took to get that data, and it turned into multiple PhDs for our group," he said. "The fact that so much data came that quickly from LSST, I can't imagine how many papers can be written. It will result in a lot of amazing stuff."
LLNL is uniquely posed to analyze the huge datasets that will come from LSST.
"From the get-go, this was advertised as a big data machine, and now we get to jump into that," said Schneider. "I think here at the Lab, our big hope for the future is that we can apply our computing, which is unprecedented, to that big data stream and do things that nobody else can."
When Rubin officially begins the Legacy Survey of Space and Time later in 2025, it will ceaselessly scan the sky nightly for 10 years to precisely capture every visible change.
"It's emotionally exciting, after more than two decades of involvement in this project, to see it come to fruition and at the level that we hoped for," said Schneider.
Many of LLNL's contributions to the Rubin Observatory were enabled through Laboratory Directed Research and Development projects. Former LLNL Director Bill Goldstein was an early supporter of the Laboratory's involvement in LSST.
