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Categories: Astronomy

#761: It’s Here! The Vera Rubin Observatory

Astronomy Cast - 3 hours 57 min ago

The time has come. The mighty Vera Rubin Observatory has finally come on line and delivered its “first light” images. And by Pamela’s rules that means we get to talk about it! So let’s do that! After decades of waiting, we have images from Vera Rubin Observatory!

Show Notes

First Light Images:
- Release of three major products:
  - SkyView Tool: Navigate Rubin’s ultra-high-res images (1 image = 50 standard 4K images)
  - Galaxy Field: Millions of galaxies at varying redshifts
  - Trifid-Omega Nebula Region: Detailed star-forming region
- Asteroid Discoveries:
  - In just 10 hours, Rubin identified 2,104 new asteroids
  - Expected to increase total known asteroids to 5 million
  - Revolutionizes planetary defense and solar system inventory
Variable Stars & Supernovae:
- Detected brightness variations in real-time
- Rubin will detect 4 million supernovae, including 1 million Type Ia
- Key for refining cosmic distance ladder and understanding dark energy
Telescope & Camera Tech:
- 8.4-meter telescope with F/1.234 focal ratio (extremely “fast”)
- 3200 megapixel camera, 10-micron pixels, 189 CCDs
- Field of view: 10 square degrees
- 30-second exposures reaching 20–24.7 magnitude
- Produces 1,000 images per night → 2 million/year
Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST):
- Rubin will image entire southern sky every 3–4 nights
- Every point will be captured ~800 times over 10 years
- Enables a “video” of the sky to detect transients, movements, and rare events
Scientific Goals (Four Pillars):
- Mapping the structure of the Milky Way
- Inventory of the Solar System
- Understanding dark matter and dark energy
- Exploring the transient optical sky (supernovae, variable stars, etc.)
Data & Infrastructure:
- Collects 20 terabytes/night, totaling 15 petabytes over the survey
- Real-time data transfer from Chile to the U.S. (SLAC, Stanford), and Europe
- Will issue alerts on transient events like supernovae and moving objects
- Public access to time-tagged image archives for long-term studies
Impact & Future Potential:
- Enables unprecedented monitoring of:
  - Asteroids, comets, & interstellar objects (dozens expected annually)
  - Rare stellar phenomena (e.g., disappearing stars, exotic variables)
  - Galactic halo structures through RR Lyrae stars
- Synergy with missions like Euclid and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope

Transcript

Fraser Cain: AstronomyCast, Episode 761 The Vera Rubin Observatory. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.

With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pam, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I am deeply regretting checking out social media prior to this recording, because today is a day that reminds me it is our next episode where we will contemplate cuts coming to NASA and the National Science Foundation, but…

Fraser Cain: Yeah, and the timing should be pretty good, because we know a lot more now, so we’ll be able to cover it in all the grim details.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, there are a lot of people actively crying right now in the astronomical community. Right now!

Fraser Cain: Next week, it will not be a happy episode, it will be a sad episode. Well, the time has come. The mighty Vera Rubin Observatory has finally come online and delivered its first light images, and by Pamela’s rules, that means we get to talk about it.

So let’s do that, and we will talk about it in a second, but it’s time for a break. And we’re back! Alright Pamela, wow.

What a week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, yeah. It has been all the highs, all the lows, all the chaos, but today we’re going to focus on one good thing, which is the stubbiest looking giant telescope on the planet.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, the largest camera on the planet, the fastest big telescope on the planet. The superlatives go on. It’s interesting watching the coverage from the mainstream media about Vera Rubin, because they’re oohing and aahing over the pretty pictures.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, but that’s not what it’s there for.

Fraser Cain: That’s not what it’s about. And so it was incredible. They were great pictures.

I love some pretty astronomical pictures, but what I think, what we hope to convey in this episode is why this is one of the most ludicrous astronomical instruments that’s ever been delivered to scientists and how this is going to change astronomy. So let’s, hmm, where do we want to start? Like, do you want to talk about the observatory or do you want to talk about sort of first light?

Let’s talk about first light first. So we got the news, I guess the embargo broke, not broke, the embargo wrapped up, was released, on Sunday night at midnight Eastern Standard Time. For me, that was nine o’clock.

And so I could finally, we saw the first pictures. And, you know, I’m sure many people in the astronomical community had already seen them. People who follow embargoes, you know, had looked at the pictures.

I refuse to look at embargoed stories. And so I saw them for the first time, like everybody else when that embargo lifted. And so you saw them Sunday night and then we saw the full press conference Monday morning.

So what were we looking at when we saw those pictures? And hopefully, you know, people who listen to this episode, you remember the pictures, you can bring them out. What are we seeing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So they released three significant things. Their SkyView data tool that allows you to take these images. One of the things they kept pointing out is a typical 4k image is 2% of an image that Ruben takes.

So you can’t just enjoy no matter how big your monitor is, all of one of these images at the same time on one monitor. So they released a SkyView image explorer that allows you to pan, scroll, zoom, all of those things. And they released two basic images, one that was a field of literally millions of galaxies, which was kind of awesome.

And they varied in redshift. So we were seeing everything from relatively nearby objects out to the distant extremes of our universe. They also released a image of the Trifid Omega Nebula region.

So star forming region galore, all of the pink pretty details, all of the black globule type stuff floating in front of it. And so we had these two different images, and then they highlighted some of the things in the galaxy image, because the Trifid Omega image, it’s a lot harder to highlight these things in. What they were highlighting is each deep image they showed us was actually a whole series of individual images taken across multiple filters.

This telescope has five different filters. And as asteroids moved through the field, they were able to identify not two, not three, but 2,104, which is a lot and kind of amazing. And these objects ranged from near earth objects, not putting us in any danger, out to the far edge of the asteroid belt.

They couldn’t really see much further out into the solar system because they only had 10 hours of exposure. And you start to just not being able to resolve the motion that well. But they also showed us highlights of variable stars.

Now for the variable stars, you have to look in the same filter for each image. So all of us had a bit of a sad moment, because we didn’t exactly get beautiful images of these variables pulsating in brightness, as all of us, especially me and my variable star loving heart would desire. Instead, we got, here’s an image, here’s several hours later, here’s an image, and you could see several tens of percent brightness change.

This is a machine that is designed to identify everything that flickers, flares and moves in the night. And they demonstrated on Monday that this telescope is here to do its job.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. And I think what the general public got from this was, look at these pretty pictures.

It’s taking beautiful pictures of galaxies, beautiful pictures of nebulae. But those of you who have been following images from James Webb, images from Hubble, you’ve seen what the Gemini telescope, Gemini North, South, the DESI survey, the Very Large Telescope, the Keck Observatory, the Large Binocular, you’re familiar with pretty pictures of space. Yeah.

And so for me, they were great. I liked them, but they were not the point. The point was the conversation about the asteroids, because that was what really sort of sharpened our idea and our understanding.

And what that telescope did in 10 hours of observing one tiny little patch of the sky is ludicrous. So on average, astronomers report about 20,000 new asteroids a year. We know of about a million asteroids total.

You know, a tiny fraction of those are the near-Earth asteroids. The ones that are crossing are the Earth’s orbit at some point in their journey around the Sun. And Vera Rubin, in 10 hours of observing, found 2,000 previously unknown asteroids.

And so in other words, the expectation is that it is going to find 10 times the number of asteroids that the rest of the astronomical community finds combined. That it is going to find 5 million asteroids over the course of its 10-year mission.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Sort of. They anticipate they will bring the total number of known asteroids to 5 million.

Fraser Cain: Right. So another 4 million, sorry. Yeah.

Yeah. So that was the kind of thing that I was really hoping that they would talk more about, and then talk about that in terms of supernovae, talk about that in terms of variable stars. They hinted at it, but I think they just want to show people like really beautiful pictures and get across the sense of the magnitude of the camera, which is that it is a really big camera.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. Yeah. It’s ludicrous.

This camera has a 10-square-degree field of view, and it has 3,200 megapixels per image. They’re planning to take 30-second exposures that are still getting down to like 20th magnitude, which is insane. And they’re planning to do about 1,000 science images per night, 2 million images per year.

They are imaging the entire sky every three to four nights. It is ludicrous.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And I think the part that I hope people will walk away with is that it’s going to be observed, as you said, every couple of nights it’s going to do this full pan of the entire sky. And then it’s going to come back and it’s going to do it again, and it’s going to do it again, and it’s going to do it again.

And it is going to, over the course of its 10 years of operation, it’s going to take a picture of each spot in the sky 800 times. And so, if you want to sort of understand the significance of this, imagine if you could run a video of the night sky where you took a frame that happened every three nights for 10 years, and then you notice something that happened in the sky four years ago. Yeah.

And then you go, oh, wait, does anybody have, you know, we noticed there’s a new supernova remnant over here. Does anybody have archival footage of when that supernova went off? Oh, yeah.

It’s in Vera Rubin. Let’s go back to that date. And you can look back in time and watch that you could make a video where you just put up one frame per, you know, whatever, 30 frames a second of the sky and run it for many seconds.

You would watch all of the asteroids zipping past, all of the Kuiper Belt objects drifting through the field of view, all of the, you know, the planet nines, all of the supernova going off, all of the variable stars that are across that entire field of view, stars disappearing because they’ve just directly collapsed into supernovae, supermassive black holes coming online because they’re now feasting on new material that’s falling in, previously active supermassive black holes shutting down because there’s no more food to eat. So it’s just this way to see the universe in this dynamic way that nobody has ever been able to do. Every single survey that we’ve ever had up until this point has been a, like a one-time survey.

You take one picture of every spot in the sky and you call it a day. And that has been, that’s been a game changer for astronomy. So now you’re not taking one, you’re taking 800 of every single spot in the sky at a level of depth that rivals the capability of the largest telescopes in the world.

So it’s all bonkers. Like, I, like, I hate that we’re having to use these superlative, like it’s crazy. It’s bonkers.

It’s madness. And yet it really is. And I think people aren’t going to really appreciate how much this is going to change astronomy until we’re a couple of years into this and you’re like, oh yeah, another thing that people found on Vera Rubin.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s going to, I think it’s going to be more like six months to a year when we start seeing it. This is one of the large telescopes in the world. It’s 8.4 meters. There are a bunch of telescopes in the eight to nine meter class, but what makes this one so weird looking and awesome is any of you amateur astronomers out there know that the focal ratio in a lot of ways tells you how quickly you can take an image. So if you have a super small focal ratio, you can take a wide field, super fast images, but you’re usually have a trade-off that you end up with really bad resolution when you do that. Well, the Rubin observatories, some in the telescope has a focal ratio of F 1.234. It is the stubbiest little telescope I have ever seen. And because of how it’s built, they have 0.2 arc seconds per pixel. So they are super saturating their pixels. They, it’s insane.

They have 10 micron pixels on their CCDs and they have 189 4K by 4K science CCD chips. These are not CMOS, these are CCD chips. They were saying in the live stream that the camera is the size of a car, but weighs a whole lot more.

Fraser Cain: Right. Because it’s like solid electronics. Doesn’t have the air inside where the people might go.

Dr. Pamela Gay: No, it’s wild just how different this observatory is. And the reason it was built this way was once upon a time, it was funded through a combination of private funding, NASA funding, National Science Foundation funding and Department of Energy. Today it’s private funding, DOE and NSF.

I’m not sure what happened to the NASA funding. I no longer question these things. But that combination of funding was in part to do the things that we expect all new telescopes to do, looking at dark energy, looking at dark matter.

But then it was also trying to protect our planet because the total fraction of asteroids known, we knew wasn’t that great. The number of potentially hazardous to our ability to continue as a civilization number of asteroids known wasn’t that great. And with its high sensitivity, with its large field of view, with its constantly repeating the sky, it’s going to find everything moving.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And help protect us.

Fraser Cain: All right. We’re going to talk about this some more, but it’s time for another break. And we’re back.

So I want to give some other just interesting numbers. For example, we currently know of about, say, 2,000 to 3,000 type 1a supernovae. And we have been finding these for 30, 40 years.

These are the supernovae that have created the discovery of dark energy. Nobel Prizes all around. And each one of these type 1a supernovae is so precious because there’s just so few of them that have ever been found.

They’re a very rare event. Well, Vera Rubin is expected to find a million of them.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. 4 million supernovae in general, they expect to find.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And a million with a million type 1a supernovae. You’ve got all of these variable stars that are going, they’re changing in brightness and that there are some really rare ones like RR Ellari and even like double RR Ellari stars that are really important to astronomers as sort of standard candles as well as ways to measure the expansion of the universe and so on.

Again, we will know of so many more of them because it’s not just seeing things that happen on a regular basis. Those exist. There’s the Zwicky Transient Facility, which is a telescope that is scanning the sky every couple of nights.

It’s found tons of asteroids and so on. But this is both an incredibly powerful telescope. It could stand up and take as good of a picture as any telescope that’s out there on the planet.

And yet it can do it in 15 seconds and move on. Right. Like done.

Next. Done. Right.

That’s where this thing just comes into, pardon the pun, focus is that it’s not just about the power of this telescope. It is about the speed and how much of the sky it’s going to be able to keep track of.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And to give you some ideas of the science with RR Ellari stars, they are horizontal branch stars, which means all of them are more or less the same actual luminosity. And when we look at them, we can identify them by how their light changes over time in very distinctive ways.

And if we can measure how bright they appear and we know how luminous they are, we know where they are. And because our Ellaris are low metallicity stars, we’re going to be able to use them to map out the distribution of field stars in the halo. Right now we’re doing great work with, with, uh, dwarf cerulean galaxies, dwarf elliptical galaxies, globular clusters, all of these groups of stars that exist in the halo.

This is going to allow us to see these fainter objects. They’re fainter than Cepheids, these lower metallicity objects, and actually see the true extent of our galaxy in all directions that aren’t blocked by dust and gas. And that in itself just has me super, super excited.

Fraser Cain: Now, one of the things that I, that I did find interesting with the presentation that they gave and the, and the images that they showed, in many cases they were done with dozens, if not hundreds of exposures in the same area. And that’s sort of like, they were showing you what it might be like if you just compressed all those 800 images into one shot, which is interesting, but then you sort of lose that time dimension when you’re looking at all of that. You’re essentially using all the separate images to improve the, the data and remove the noise, which is great and important.

But, um, you know, in addition to this sort of the general survey, you know, this is the LSST. Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Large Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

Fraser Cain: Right. They’re going to do some special operations where they’re going to look at some specific areas and they’re going to observe them very intensely on a very rapid cadence. And so we’re also going to see stuff where like maybe there’s some place where we’re, you know, trying to, trying to see how variable stars are changing or a place where we know there’s a lot of supernovae going off and get a much better sense as well.

So it does not. And, and I think sort of the images that they shared are sort of more in line with that philosophy that you’re, you’re keeping the telescope locked on one area and going click, click, click, click, click, and taking a bunch of pictures. So for places that are, you know, in addition to just this, the, the, the full survey of the sky, we’re going to get some regions and that will almost be the equivalent of Vera Rubin’s, um, Hubble Deep Field.

Yes. Right. That it’s going to take a place that is very dynamic where maybe things are changing down to the second or the minute and see what you can capture if you just take picture after picture after picture of that same area.

So, so there’s a lot of other interesting science that’s going to come out of this as well than, than all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And they, they really designed this around four, they call them pillars of science. And, um, it’s that standard question of where is all of the dark matter and how is dark energy changing the shape of space over time? And so with their image after image, they’re, they’re starting out hitting low twenties in magnitude, which is ludicrous to think about.

Fraser Cain: And then just for comparison, the, the European Southern Observatory, I think they’re at 27. Hubble can do 32, 30. Yeah.

Anyway.

Dr. Pamela Gay: But those are with like significant numbers of hours, days there in 30 seconds. Yeah. Hitting, uh, in our, this, this is a Sloan R they’re hitting 24.7 magnitude in a single exposure. Wow. Yeah. So it’s ludicrous.

Um, so, so they’re able to map out galaxies at a whole variety of different distances. And by looking at what was the universe doing in the great distance? What was it doing in the middle distance?

What is it doing nearby? What are all these galaxies doing? How is the shape and structure of large scale structure of the universe changing?

That can tell us how dark energy has changed over time. So this is working in lockstep with the Euclid mission, with the hopefully to be completed Roman observatory, all these missions and this program are working together to solve dark matter, dark energy. But in addition to that, it’s literally inventorying our solar system.

It is finding the near earth asteroids. We need to watch out for it is looking to figure out just how often do alien asteroids plunge through our solar system. If there’s a planet nine through N out in the outskirts of our solar system, it will find it or them.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. It’s expected to find dozens of interstellar objects every year. You know, we know of Oumuamua and Borisov and that’s it.

It’s going to find dozens, if not hundreds of these every year.

Dr. Pamela Gay: If we have the models, correct. And that’s the thing. This is going to tell us if we have our models correct for things we don’t fully understand.

And so we’re getting discrete data on where are the centaurs, how many of them are there, what all these different things. It just blows my mind. You’re literally going to have more data on what’s going on in our solar system than you could monitor on a computer monitor.

Fraser Cain: All right. We got to take another break. Okay.

And we’re back. All right. So where do things go from here?

So we’ve seen first light, but they’re still in the commissioning phase. The survey has not begun yet. So what is going to be happening next?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So they’re continuing to figure out their entire pipeline process and commission the telescope. So what they’re doing is they’re figuring out everything from how does the system flex depending on where it’s pointed on the sky. This is something every telescope does.

They’re physical objects in a world with gravity, they flex. So it’s figuring that out. It’s figuring out how focus changes over time.

It’s figuring out what are the details for getting the data reduction pipeline working. They’re pulling down terabytes per night.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. They’re going to pull 500,000 terabytes and they’re transferring this all in real time from the telescope to the servers in the US. So they’re not storing it locally on the telescope.

They’re moving it right away and then processing it in real time to give astronomers alerts. We just found a supernova here. We just saw an asteroid over there.

There’s planet nine over here. And then if people want, they can dig through the data for their own specific things. Show me every image that was taken in this part of the sky over the last 10 years and you can get them all.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And one of the things that truly amazed me is, so with 20 terabytes per night, they were originally thinking we’re not going to be able to keep all the data. We’re going to have to throw stuff out. And that’s one of those things that will make any astronomer curse.

And we thought we were only going to be able to keep data tables because there was just no way all the raw data could be stored. But in the 20 years it’s taken them to get this telescope built, commissioned and out the door, there were delays with the pandemic. There were delays with social unrest.

Working with Cisco systems, taking advantage of new infrastructure built into that part of Chile. This is on the Sarah Fashion Mountain, which the subtitles literally wrote Sarah Fashion during the presser. It was hilarious.

They’re transmitting all the data to Slack here in the United States, the linear accelerator out at Stanford. They’re also transferring information to Europe. There’ll be multiple repositories.

And with their 11 data releases, there’s going to be 15 petabytes of data.

Fraser Cain: Wow.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: So crazy.

Dr. Pamela Gay: This is completely new layers of data management. There will be 6 million orbits of solar system bodies that they figure out through this survey.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So I think hopefully this gives you all a good sense of expectation, what to be looking out for. It’s not about the pretty pictures.

It’s about the events unfolding in the sky that we will now be able to capture. And I think the thing that I’m most excited about is the thing that I don’t know about yet. What are the, now that we’re watching everything, I always describe it as we’re finally going to see the things that the universe was doing when we weren’t looking.

Now we’re looking and it’s going to be entirely new phenomena that will be discovered through this process where someone goes, Hey, I just saw a thing and I don’t know what it is. Have we ever seen any of these before? Oh yeah.

Here’s 42 of them in the Vera Rubin data. Let’s figure out what they are. And we’re moving to this sort of additional understanding, but hopefully this will prepare everybody for what comes next, because it is going to be a busy decade.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It really is. And what’s exciting is we have other giant telescopes coming online that will be able to do follow-up observations. We have the square kilometer coming in future years.

The amount of infrastructure scattered around our planet, allowing us to understand our universe is unlike anything we thought we would have when you and I were young. And here’s to hoping that there will be plenty of scientists to get to explore it.

Fraser Cain: Wonderful. Thank you, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to everyone out there funding everything we do. This week, I would like to take a moment to thank Adam Anise Brown, Alexis, Andy Moore, and Astro Bob, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Brian Kilby, Kemi Rassian, Conrad Hailing, Danny McGlitchie, David Green, Disastrina, Dwight Ilk, Evil Melky, Flower Guy, G.

Caleb Saxton, Glenn Phelps, Greg Davis, Helga Bjorkhag, Janelle, Jeanette Wink, Jim McGeehan, J.O., John Herman, Jordan Turner, Kate Sindretto, Kenneth Ryan, Christian Magerholt, Lee Harbourn, Marco Iarrazi, Masa Herleo, Maxim Levitt, Michael Purcell, Mike Dogg, Nick Boyd, Paul Pauline, Middle Ink, Planetar, R.J. Basque, Robert Plasma, Sergio Sanseviero, Scone, Semyon Torfason, Slug, Stephen Miller, The Big Squish Squash, Thomas Gazzetta, Travis C.

Porco, Wanderer M101, Zero Chill, Alan Gross, Andrew Allen. I started reading next week’s names. Thank you all so very much.

We have one more episode this season. It’s not going to be a happy one.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week.

Bye-bye.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it, share it and remix it.

But please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, astronomycast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon.

If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at patreon.com slash astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already.Anyways, keep looking up. This has been AstronomyCast.

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