The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the first project at the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, will be the most comprehensive optical astronomical sky survey ever undertaken. Starting this year, Rubin Observatory will obtain panoramic images covering the sky visible from its location in Chile every clear night for ten years. The resulting 60 petabytes of raw imaging data, essentially a digital color movie of the night sky, will include about 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and will be used for investigations ranging from cataloging potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids to fundamental physics such as characterization of dark matter and dark energy. I will briefly describe scientific goals behind this project that drove its design, illustrate the progress of its ongoing construction, and finish with a discussion of data analysis challenges that need to be tackled to make the best use of the massive and complex LSST dataset.
13/05/2025
Speaker: Zeljko Ivezic (Director of Rubin Construction, University of Washington)
Link to the streaming: meet.google.com/zev-pdvv-gku
Tuesday, May 13, at 12 CEST in Aula Gratton and streamed live