UW astronomers help power up telescope featuring world’s largest digital camera to map the night sky

Perched high on a ridge in the South American Andes, a new observatory aims to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos and unravel some of the mysteries it holds. Featuring the world’s largest digital camera, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will spend the next 10 years constantly surveying and recording time-lapse movies of the stars, galaxies, asteroids and other objects moving across the southern hemisphere. The ultra-high-definition images will help create a kind of “Google Maps” of the night sky, according to Mario Jurić, a University of Washington astronomy professor and member of the observatory’s international science team.

Jurić and his team are creating an online database that amateur and professional astronomers can access to track changes across space and time and zoom into celestial objects of interest – including asteroids that may be on a collision course with Earth. Jurić joins us to share more about the observatory’s capabilities and the first set of images it will reveal on June 23.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez, in this week for Dave Miller. I am so excited to be back on live radio with y’all. Thank you for tuning in. We start today’s show with a topic no less grand than unlocking the mysteries of the cosmos. A groundbreaking new observatory, years in the making, aims to create a massive time-lapse map of the night sky. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to collect more data in its first year than all other telescopes in the combined history of humanity. And this morning ...

Mario Jurić [recording]: This is the first image that we are unveiling for the whole world today. [Audience applause]

Chávez: The international team of scientists behind the project shared the very first images made by the telescope. Pretty cool, right? Well, I’m joined now by Mario Jurić, a professor of astronomy who’s working on this at the University of Washington. Professor Jurić, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Jurić: Thanks, Jenn. Glad to be here.

Chávez: This morning, like I said, was very exciting. You and other scientists on your team unveiled the first ever images to be produced by this observatory to the public. It was amazing. I was tuned in. What did we see in those images?

Jurić: Oh, it was phenomenally exciting. What we’ve seen, we’ve shown the public for the first time, just two small snippets of what Rubin is going to be doing over the next 10 years. We’ve seen two images, one of two nebulae called the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae. These are areas in the Milky Way where new stars are being born right now – thousands, likely tens of thousands of stars – and Rubin was able to give us an unprecedentedly deep and wide look into those. The images are beautiful. It’s hard to explain in words. They’re all full of red and blue, and this wispy, mist-like, almost backgrounds.

And the other image that we’ve seen is the almost exact opposite of that. We’ve looked outside our Milky Way, far out into a region called the Virgo Cluster, where there are thousands and tens of thousands of galaxies in one area of space. And then, what’s unique about this telescope, it doesn’t see just those galaxies that are roughly 50 million light years away. It sees all the galaxies that are behind them. So when we counted them all up, there are about 10 million galaxies in that region.

Chávez: Wow, that is hard for me to even wrap my head around. I want to dig in with you, but first I want to ask, how did it feel to you to see images created by the Rubin Observatory for the first time? I know that this has been in the making for years, for decades. How did it feel to see those images?

Jurić: It felt great and you’re not exaggerating when you say decades. My first encounter with this project was in 2006 and I have colleagues who worked on it for even longer. To see it actually on the sky, and most importantly, to see the work of a team of hundreds of people actually deliver images that are as good, if not better than what we expected, is just tremendous. I just cannot put that in words. It was phenomenal. This morning was one of the best mornings of my life.

Chávez: Wow, congratulations. That is amazing. This observatory is named in honor of the astronomer Vera C. Rubin. She did foundational work around the existence of dark matter, which no one has ever directly seen. Can you tell us more about her work and why this observatory is named after her?

Jurić: Dark matter is this thing that … The original concepts go back to the late 1930s. It’s when a different astronomer noticed that galaxies and galaxy clusters seemed to move a little bit too fast. When I say a little bit, I mean, much faster than they’re supposed to move. And then he’s thinking, maybe there’s something else in there that we don’t see. But like many things in astronomy, it was one of these ideas that wasn’t quite clear if it’s a right explanation or not. And then, that was roughly there on the shelf for a couple of decades.

Then Vera Rubin comes along in the 1970s and realizes that she can test this hypothesis, not by just looking at galaxies, but by looking at individual stars in galaxies. And we understand how stars work in galaxies much better. She finds the same effect. And then it dawns on her that you can explain both of these types of behavior by … if we just introduce an unseen dark component into our universe that, to make the math work and to make the observations work, has to be 10 times more abundant than than all the lights and all the normal matter that we see.

That’s why she’s so significant. She’s literally changed our thinking about the universe, because before Vera, we lived in the universe where the things that we see around us are all there is. After her, we knew that it was only 10% of everything, so it’s a dramatic shift. And this telescope bears her name because, by now, we’re very convinced that dark matter is real and that it exists, but we still don’t know what it is. So one of the things we’re going to try to do with this telescope is answer that question: What is dark matter? Is that some kind of a new particle? What kind of particle? Or is there something completely different?

Chávez: Well, I am very excited for you all and humanity at large to find out some of these answers. There are many observatories around the world astronomers use to gaze at the night sky. This one is unique, I think, in the sheer scope of what it’s gazing at. What is so special about Rubin?

Jurić: What’s special about this observatory is that most typical observatories when they’re built, the idea is to go and zoom in on one or few objects and get an exquisite in-depth look at those objects. What’s different with Rubin is that we said, can we build something where we don’t have to zoom in on a single object? Where we can just go and zoom in on the entire sky, download everything, put it in a database and then do all kinds of science that we can imagine. Everything from looking for killer asteroids to understanding what dark matter is with one data set.

And that’s what Rubin is. It’s a telescope that has a special design that allows it to map incredibly large volumes of the universe, something between a factor of 10 to 100 more than anything that we’ve done before, depending on which metric you use. That’s what makes it unique. It can literally map the universe.

Chávez: I know this observatory features the world’s largest digital camera – we’re talking like the size of a car, big. What does that mean for its imaging capabilities compared with other telescopes out there, not just the scope of what we’re seeing, but the detail with which we’re seeing it?

Jurić: That camera is a large part of what we just talked about. It has 3.2 billion pixels, that’s 3,200 megapixels. I don’t know what the latest iPhone is these days, but it’s usually a few tens of megapixels, your camera. Well, this is about 100 times more than that,

Chávez: Much better than an iPhone.

Jurić: So what this camera can do is, it allows us to take images of a large area of the sky very, very quickly, to very, very large depth. And that’s what’s incredibly unique about it. There’s nothing comparable in astronomy today.

Chávez: What cool and exciting things could this observatory allow astronomers to see that we humans haven’t seen before? You told us about a couple right at the beginning of our conversation. What can we expect from this amazing observatory?

Jurić: Oh, how many weeks do we have to talk about it?

Chávez: [Laughs] Let’s just keep it going.

Jurić: I’ll try to summarize. The goal of this observatory site is to just go and map the universe. So the way I like to think about it, this is a mission to download the sky, put that sky into a database, create something like a search engine for the sky. Think of it almost as a “Google” of the sky, and then make that available to every astronomer in the U.S. and ultimately the world. So then, anything that an astronomer can think of, rather than having to go and ask for time on a large telescope, they basically have their own 8-meter telescope. And better yet, that 8-meter telescope has already explored the entire sky.

So what kinds of things can we do with this? Let’s say one is interested in the solar system, like I am. The question that I want to know is, is there another large planet in the solar system? Is there this putative Planet Nine? And if there is, I think we’re going to find it with this observatory over the next couple of years. You move further out, you move into the Milky Way. You can ask for whether there are all kinds of exotic objects that people have just theorized about in the Milky Way.

This observatory is going to measure, or record, or find, billions of stars. If there’s a phenomenon that happens once in a million, we’re going to see thousands to tens of thousands of such objects. So you can go look for incredibly rare things like stars falling into black holes and being shredded as they do so, and so on, and so on.

You move out further out in space, you can ask how galaxies form, how they evolve, how they collide. One of the things that we’ve seen on the images we’ve shown this morning is these beautiful images of galaxies colliding and then shredding each other by throwing away stars. And then, moving further out in the universe, you get to questions like the questions of dark matter, dark energy, and all of this from a single telescope, from a single data set. That’s what makes this so powerful.

Chávez: I know that part of the power of this telescope is it’s going to be able to show movement and change. I’m wondering if the observatory and the data it’s collecting over time can help us keep track of potential threats to Earth, like any asteroids that might be near Earth or headed our way?

Jurić: We imaged the entire sky and there’s no way not to see asteroids. This observatory, one of the things that we really, really wanted to get done well, is to make an unprecedentedly good census of the solar system. So one of the things that we announced this morning are the first discoveries, as well, in addition to images.

We’ve discovered 2,000 new asteroids, just in roughly the time that it takes to observe for one night. And to give your listeners a sense of how big that number is: Today, all observatories on the planet find roughly 20,000 asteroids per year. In about one-and-a- half nights of observing, we found 2,000. So this observatory is going to make a huge difference in finding all kinds of asteroids, including any potentially dangerous ones, so that we know if they’re coming at us and have time to do something about it.

Chávez: It’s striking me as we’re talking, just the scale of everything you are getting. This telescope will be capturing 20 terabytes of data a night, if I’m not mistaken, and is expected to detect about 10 million changes to the night sky every night. That kind of sounds overwhelming. How will scientists go about sorting through this fire hose of data that you’re getting?

Jurić: Your numbers are correct. It’s 20 terabytes a night, and if you think about it on a yearly basis, it’s 6 petabytes per year. So that’s 6,000 terabytes every year.

Chávez: I don’t even know what “petabytes” means … if that gives any sense. [Laughs]

Jurić: It’s 6,000 terabytes, so that’s 6 million gigabytes, if we’re thinking about that in terms of the sizes on our cell phones.

How are we gonna do this? We’re gonna do this by teaching computers to do it for us. Astronomy, one of the things that has been happening in astronomy, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the culmination of that, is that our science is changing. Astronomers used to primarily be, I jokingly would explain that to my students, physicists who look up.

So what do we need to know? We needed to know physics. We needed to know mathematics. Now we need computers. We need to know software engineering, we need to know data science. We need to know AI, because it’s not us anymore, who are going to be looking for these changes. Our job now is to teach the computer how to go through billions and trillions of objects like these and then find the few that are worthy enough of us humans to look at. That’s how we’re going to do it. We’re learning how to teach computers to go through all these data and then find the most interesting ones.

Chávez: One of the coolest things about this project, to me, is like you said, it’s designed to be kind of “open source,” that other astronomers can use. And that’s not just for professional astronomers, but for amateur astronomers or maybe future astronomers who don’t even know they’re interested in this yet. How do you hope this observatory could help or even inspire the next generation of citizen scientists?

Jurić: That’s a great question. What’s unique about us is, Rubin will download this huge database. I like to [say] we’re downloading the sky and we’re putting it into a database. And then that database becomes available to all scientists in the U.S. but also amateur astronomers who really want to take a stab at “digging through it.” And the way you would do that is by coming up with clever algorithms to go find things that others have not found before.

And where citizen science comes in is, I’ve met dozens, possibly hundreds of people who are now working at companies like Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Folks who are incredibly technical, who know data science, who know AI, who know these tools, in many ways much better than we professional astronomers do. And who, at the same time, still have that passion for space and astronomy that they may have had as a kid, and may have a small telescope in their backyard.

Well, guess what? Now they get to have our 8-meter telescope as well in their computer. So they can apply their techniques, their knowledge, and how to mine large data sets to find faint signals or unusual things that no one’s seen before, on this largest survey of the sky ever devised in human history. So imagine when you open it up like that to potentially tens of thousands of people who come up with new ideas and new ways to do things. This is one of the things that I really, really hope that Rubin will be transformative for. And we’ll discover lots of science, not necessarily coming from professional astronomers but from such amateur computational astronomers as well.

Chávez: Well, it certainly is inspirational and gosh, congratulations on this huge achievement that y’all have reached today.

Jurić: Thank you very much and glad to have been able to talk to you about it.

Chávez: I’m glad too. That was Mario Jurić, a professor of astronomy, leader of the University of Washington science team at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

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