A new era of astronomy and astrophysics began Monday when the first images captured by the NSF鈥揇OE were released, demonstrating the extraordinary capabilities of the new telescope and the world鈥檚 largest digital camera.

Officials in Washington, D.C., unveiled large, ultra-high-definition images and videos, as well as discoveries of thousands of new asteroids. Astronomers and researchers around the world watched along at viewing parties, including at the 91探花鈥檚 Planetarium.

The images offer a preview of the most comprehensive census of the solar system scientists have ever conducted, and a peek into the exponential increase in discoveries and understanding of the cosmos this new telescope will make possible.

The 91探花was one of the founding members of Rubin鈥檚 ambitious undertaking and will play a key role in making sense of the discoveries. 91探花scientists and engineers were critical in advocating for the project, designing the observatory and developing the software that will analyze the petabytes of data from Rubin鈥檚 telescope, including the asteroid discovery algorithms.

鈥�91探花 faculty recognized early on that dreaming big about Rubin鈥檚 capabilities and leading the scientific charge would shape our knowledge of the solar system and propel innovation in data science not only in astrophysics but also across disciplines,” said 91探花Provost Tricia R. Serio. “We often talk about the impact the 91探花is making here and around the world. This project will take us far into space and give us information about the very origins of the universe and set the stage for future discoveries we can’t even imagine today.”

From its peak in the Chilean Andes, Rubin鈥檚 Simonyi Survey Telescope will scan the sky with its 8.4-meter mirror and enormous 3,200-megapixel camera, the largest digital camera in the world. The telescope鈥檚 sight path, the pace and frequency of observations and the vast field of vision required a new type of discovery algorithm to reliably make sense of the troves of data collected. Scientists and researchers at the 91探花worked across disciplines to evolve data science and computer science to meet Rubin鈥檚 demands.

In 2017, the 91探花鈥� with founding support from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences 鈥� established the , or DiRAC. The Institute, part of the , aims to be an interdisciplinary hub to address fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of the universe. Leaders recognized that the future of astrophysics relied on using software as the chief instrument for this exploration. Combined with the UW鈥檚 and the deep connections to the Pacific Northwest鈥檚 tech community, DiRAC has developed a global reputation for working toward new discoveries.

As the Rubin sets out on a 10-year mission to conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), software created at the 91探花will be pivotal as scientists advance understanding of the cosmos and the origins of the solar system. UW’s faculty, students and staff have played key roles in the construction of this new facility They’ve also been pivotal in developing the algorithms that keep the telescope image sharp and creating the codes for mapping the solar system and discovering the most energetic and rarest phenomena in what astrophysicists call the 鈥� UW’s , a professor of astronomy, is the director of the federally-funded Rubin Construction Project.听

Unlike other telescopes 鈥� which tend to focus and 鈥渮oom in鈥� on a few objects of interest 鈥� Rubin is alone in the capability to quickly and repeatedly map the entire visible sky.听

鈥淩ubin has the unprecedented capacity to capture the cosmos,鈥� said , a professor of astronomy and director of UW鈥檚 . He鈥檚 also the co-principal investigator of the supported LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing (LINCC) Frameworks program to develop state-of-the-art analysis techniques capable of meeting Rubin鈥檚 scale and complexity.

鈥淩ubin will deliver the largest map the universe ever made: tens of billions of galaxies, billions of stars and millions of new small bodies in our own solar system. It鈥檚 a data analysis endeavor of epic proportions,鈥� Connolly said.听

For each object Rubin observes, there will be much more than a static image, the technology will produce a thousand-frame movie: trillions of measurements of billions of objects, said , a research associate professor and the science lead of Rubin鈥檚 time-domain software team.

鈥淲ith these data, scientists will better understand the universe, chronicle its evolution, and delve into science ranging from dangerous asteroids to the mysteries of dark energy,鈥� Bellm said.

For example, the UW鈥檚 team helped create simulation software to predict Rubin鈥檚 discoveries. The research found that the telescope will map more than 5 million main-belt asteroids, 127,000 near-Earth objects, 109,000 Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter鈥檚 orbit, 37,000 trans-Neptunian objects and about 2,000 Centaurs, or orbit-crossing objects.听

These objects, revealed in color and in more detail than was previously possible, help tell the story of the solar system鈥檚 origins, said , a professor of astronomy and the principal investigator of UW鈥檚 Rubin team.

Juric said that Rubin will help answer some fundamental questions: How did the planets form? Is there an unknown planet hiding in the outskirts of our solar system? Did comets bring water to the Earth? Or asteroids? And are there any that could still collide with us today?

鈥淭he first look we share today is a glimpse into the transformational capacity Rubin will bring to answer questions like these,鈥� Juric said.

The work to support the Rubin Observatory hasn鈥檛 been limited to 91探花faculty. Numerous 91探花undergraduate and doctoral students have played contributing roles, authoring important journal articles, developing simulation software and writing complex computer codes.听

Exposure to the LSST has helped prepare students to succeed post graduation, whether applying for work in industry or moving onto advanced academic degrees.

鈥淒eveloping cloud-based analytics platforms, or building pipelines to process large amounts of imaging data, are skills that allow one to do not just cutting-edge astronomy but also any other data-intensive problem,鈥� said Steven Stetzler, who recently completed doctoral work at 91探花and now holds a postdoctoral appointment at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For more information, contact Juric at mjuric@uw.edu or James Davenport at jrad@uw.edu.听

The 91探花 and Carnegie Mellon University have announced an expansive, multiyear collaboration to create new software platforms to analyze large astronomical datasets generated by the upcoming , or LSST, which will be carried out by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile. The open-source platforms are part of the new LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing 鈥� known as LINCC 鈥� and will fundamentally change how scientists use modern computational methods to make sense of big data.

Through the LSST, the Rubin Observatory, a joint initiative of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, will collect and process more than 20 terabytes of data each night 鈥� and up to 10 petabytes each year for 10 years 鈥� and will build detailed composite images of the southern sky. Over its expected decade of observations, astrophysicists estimate the Department of Energy鈥檚 will detect and capture images of an estimated 30 billion stars, galaxies, stellar clusters and asteroids. Each point in the sky will be visited around 1,000 times over the survey鈥檚 10 years, providing researchers with valuable time series data.

Scientists plan to use this data to address fundamental questions about our universe, such as the formation of our solar system, the course of near-Earth asteroids, the birth and death of stars, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the universe鈥檚 murky early years and its ultimate fate, among other things.

鈥淭ools that utilize the power of cloud computing will allow any researcher to search and analyze data at the scale of the LSST, not just speeding up the rate at which we make discoveries but changing the scientific questions that we can ask,鈥� said , a 91探花professor of astronomy, director of the and former director of the Institute 鈥� commonly known as the DiRAC Institute.

The Rubin Observatory will produce an unprecedented data set through the LSST. To take advantage of this opportunity, the LSST Corporation created the LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing, whose launch was announced Aug. 9 at the Rubin Observatory Project & Community Workshop. One of LINCC鈥檚 primary goals is to create new and improved analysis infrastructure that can accommodate the data鈥檚 scale and complexity that will result in meaningful and useful pipelines of discovery for LSST data.

鈥淢any of the LSST鈥檚 science objectives share common traits and computational challenges. If we develop our algorithms and analysis frameworks with forethought, we can use them to enable many of the survey鈥檚 core science objectives,鈥� said , professor of physics and member of the at Carnegie Mellon.

Connolly and Mandelbaum will co-lead the project, which will consist of programmers and scientists based at the 91探花and Carnegie Mellon, who will create platforms using professional software engineering practices and tools. Specifically, they will create a 鈥渃loud-first鈥� system that also supports high-performance computing systems in partnership with the , a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, and the National Science Foundation鈥檚 . The LSST Corporation will run programs to engage the LSST Science Collaborations and broader science community in the design, testing and use of the new tools.

The LINCC analysis platforms are supported by , a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that 鈥渂ets early on exceptional people making the world better.鈥� This project is part of Schmidt Futures鈥� work in astrophysics, which aims to accelerate our knowledge about the universe by supporting the development of software and hardware platforms to facilitate research across the field of astronomy.

鈥淢any years ago, the Schmidt family provided one of the first grants to advance the original design of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. We believe this telescope is one of the most important and eagerly awaited instruments in astrophysics in this decade. By developing platforms to analyze the astronomical datasets captured by the LSST, Carnegie Mellon University and the 91探花 are transforming what is possible in the field of astronomy,鈥� said Stuart Feldman, chief scientist at Schmidt Futures.鈥淭he software funded by this gift will magnify the scientific return on the public investment by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy to build and operate Rubin Observatory鈥檚 revolutionary telescope, camera and data systems,鈥� said Adam Bolton, director of the Community Science and Data Center at NSF鈥檚 NOIRLab. The center will collaborate with LINCC scientists and engineers to make the LINCC framework accessible to the broader astronomical community.

Through this new project, new algorithms and processing pipelines developed at LINCC will be able to be used across fields within astrophysics and cosmology to sift through false signals, filter out noise in the data and flag potentially important objects for follow-up observations. The tools developed by LINCC will support a 鈥渃ensus of our solar system鈥� that will chart the courses of asteroids; help researchers to understand how the universe changes with time; and build a 3D view of the universe鈥檚 history.

“Our goal is to maximize the scientific output and societal impact of Rubin LSST, and these analysis tools will go a huge way toward doing just that,鈥� said Jeno Sokoloski, director for science at the LSST Corporation. 鈥淭hey will be freely available to all researchers, students, teachers and members of the general public.”

Northwestern University and the University of Arizona, in addition to the 91探花and Carnegie Mellon, are hub sites for LINCC. The University of Pittsburgh will partner with the Carnegie Mellon hub.

is a professor in the 91探花 Department of Astronomy. He is one of working on the , or LSST, which will begin scanning the sky in 2022 from its location atop Cerro Pach贸n, a mountain in northern Chile.

He has called it “one of the most exciting experiments in astrophysics today,” adding, “it could completely transform our knowledge of the universe, from understanding how dark energy drives the expansion of the universe, to identifying asteroids that may one day impact the Earth.”

Over the years, Connolly has worked on a number of areas in the design and construction of the LSST, from running the 91探花data management group that develops software to study information that will come from the telescope, to leading a team developing simulations of what this powerful new telescope might see. On his web page he says, “My science focuses on analyzing large astronomical data sets to study the formation and evolution of galaxies and cosmology.”

Throughout his career he has been involved with big data projects. As a postdoctoral researcher he was involved in the , or SDSS, a collaboration of about 200 astronomers at more than 40 institutions on four continents that has been scanning the sky and collecting data since 2000. During a sabbatical in 2006 at Google, Connolly was the project leader for , which incorporated images from the and the SDSS into Google Earth.

Connolly answered a few questions about his work and the promise of big data and tools such as the LSST to astronomy.

Q: Where are you spending the year, and what are you working on?

A.C.: I am in Cambridge (the UK version) for a year. I’m working on a few different areas ranging from the detection of objects whose light has been bent (or gravitationally lensed) by distant galaxies, to studying how we can survey the sky to maximize how quickly we can get science from the LSST.

These may seem like very different questions and problems but they are in fact related. They both involve searching for subtle signals from large complex data sets. Signals that are hard to extract but if we can, we might be able to understand how the universe evolves (driven by dark energy and dark matter).

We have a lot of different ways to look at the sky (different telescopes and instruments) and many tools that can be used when working with data, but it is only when you start applying these techniques to real observations that you can understand how well they will perform in practice. I’m trying to use some of the techniques that we will use on the LSST but on today’s data sets.

So you could say that I am getting my hands dirty with data, which has been a lot of fun, especially with the LSST a few years away.

Q: In your TED talk you say that a single image from the LSST will be equivalent to 3,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope. How is this achieved?

A.C.: The LSST isn’t the biggest telescope in the world (unlike the new generation of telescopes that will have mirrors 30 meters across), nor does it have the highest-quality images (such as those from space base telescopes like the Hubble).

What it does have is a very large field of view (one image covers an area seven times the width of the full moon) and the largest digital camera in the world (with 3.2 billion pixels). This means it can survey half of the sky every three nights to discover if anything has changed or moved (something Hubble would take about 120 years to do just once).

One of the great aspects of all of the telescopes and instruments we are building today is that they have different and complementary capabilities (e.g. the Hubble can look at great detail at very faint sources but can’t cover large areas of the sky). Combined, we get to reveal both the big picture and the details of how the universe has evolved up to the present day.

Q: What are the challenges that you face in order to answer these “big questions”?

A.C.: Within the next decade new telescopes (on Earth and in space), and new cameras and spectrographs will realize a 1,000-fold increase in the amount of data accessible to astronomers. The size of the data will enable us to answer some of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics today 鈥� questions we have been asking since we started looking up at the stars and wondering how they came into being.

Discoveries that might come from the data include:

• Measurements of the shapes of distant galaxies could reveal the properties of dark energy with an accuracy 10 times better than today. This could change our understanding of general relativity if it shows that gravity works differently on large scales.
• Surveys of the faint radio sky may detect the epoch at which stars and galaxies first began to form within the universe.
• Tracking the orbits of asteroids and comets could reveal if the environment in which the Sun formed was responsible for the distribution of the planets in our solar system or identify asteroids that might one day impact the Earth (at distances where we can do something about it).

Some of the most exciting discoveries will be answers to questions that today we don’t even know how to ask.

But this data-rich era comes with a big challenge: Scientific discovery is beginning to be limited not by how we collect or store data, but how we extract the knowledge it contains.

We are reaching a stage where our data are much richer than many of the analyses we apply to them, and where software and algorithms have the potential to become the next instrument for exploring the universe.

Fixing this gap between the science and the amount of data is something that we need to address. The increasing complexity and size of data coming from these instruments means astrophysics is becoming ever more dependent on developments in computing. It also means that there is a great opportunity for discovery if we can prepare the next generation of students and postdocs with the skills that are needed for an era rich in data.

Q: You also mention that “the smart use of data” and new tools will transform astronomy in coming years, “opening up a window in the universe 鈥� the window of time.” What new understanding of the cosmos might this bring?

A.C.: There are so many things we know about the universe but don’t understand. We know it is expanding and this expansion is getting faster, but we don’t understand what causes the acceleration.

We know that the dynamics of the universe suggest that most of the matter is not visible, but we don’t understand what particles might make up that matter. We can see the diversity of stars and galaxies that have formed in the universe, but we don’t understand, in detail, the physical processes that drive the formation and evolution of galaxies or the formation of the first stars.

It is a great time to be an astronomer because a new generation of telescopes and surveys might help us unlock these answers by providing a view of the universe that has unprecedented detail. Data will answer these questions (hopefully) and this revolution in data will occur over the next decade.

• Visit for more information about the 91探花and the LSST.
• Watch a video of Connolly’s 2014 TED talk (and learn more ):

With a key funding approval, the , an international astronomy project of which the 91探花 is a founding member, is taking a major step toward becoming a reality.

The National Science Foundation agreed Friday to support the in managing construction of the long-planned telescope 鈥� called the LSST for short 鈥� to be built on Cerro Pach贸n, a mountain in northern Chile.

“The LSST is one of the most exciting experiments in astrophysics today,” said , 91探花professor of astronomy, who heads the 91探花group managing data for the telescope. “When it comes online at the end of this decade, it could completely transform our knowledge of our universe, from understanding how dark energy drives the expansion of the universe, to identifying asteroids that may one day impact the Earth.”

Connolly is one of several . Others include , professor of astronomy and project scientist; , research associate professor; Mario Juric, astronomy professor; and research associates , , Scott Daniel and , as well as graduate student .

The telescope is expected to see (or its first use) in 2019 and begin its decade of full science operations in 2022. The NSF construction budget will not exceed $473 million and annual operation costs have been estimated at $40 million, in 2013 dollars.

When operational, the telescope will scan the entire visible sky every few nights from its mountaintop location, in time producing an unprecedented astronomical survey of the universe with its 27.5-foot ground based telescope. Its data will be available to the public as well as scientists. 91探花work on the telescope includes building the software tools to detect nightly changes in the sky and alert astronomers globally to anything new.

The project is a partnership between the NSF and the Department of Energy. The NSF will oversee the telescope, site, data management system and education and outreach, while the Energy Department will provide the camera and related instrumentation.

The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy is a consortium of 39 U.S. institutions and six international affiliates. The telescope passed its final design review by the NSF in December of 2013. The Energy Department’s approval of the telescope’s camera is expected this fall.

The UW’s Connolly said the huge flow of data from the telescope will “open up the window of time,” creating a digital movie of the universe. This will be used to create models “for how our universe works 鈥� models that can predict its future and explain its past.”

• Adapted from a by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.