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Title: Rubin Observatory Has Started Paging Astronomers 800,000 Times a Night

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/02/28/0...

On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert
system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging
asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and "other transient celestial
events," reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning -- that
number is projected to climb into the millions as it continues scanning the
ever-changing sky. From the report: The astronomical observatory equipped
with world's largest camera hit a key milestone on February 24, when a
complex data-processing system pushed hundreds of thousands of alerts out to
scientists eager to pore over its most exciting sightings. The Vera C. Rubin
Observatory began operations last year, capturing stunning, panoramic time-
lapse views of the cosmos with ease. Rubin's first images, based on just 10
hours of observations, let space fans zoom seemingly forever into an
overwhelmingly starry sky. But watchful astronomers were always awaiting the
next step: the system that would automatically alert them to the most
promising activity in the overhead sky amid the 1,000 or so enormous images
that Rubin's telescope captures every night. "We can detect everything that
changes, moves and appears," said Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton
University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management, to
Scientific American last summer. "It's way too much for one person to
manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves." So even as they
were designing and building the Rubin Observatory itself, scientists were
also designing an alert system to help astronomers navigate the flood of
data. As soon as the telescope began observations, the team started
constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail.
Now the data processing systems that support the observatory are starting to
automatically compare every new Rubin image to the corresponding section of
that background template. The systems identify all of the differences, each
of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between
a potential supernova and a possible newfound asteroid, for example. Alerting
the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers -- as well
as members of the public -- can sign up for notifications based on the type
of sighting they're interested in and the brightness of the observation in
question. And now that the alerts system has gone live, users receive a tiny,
fuzzy image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits
their criteria -- all just a couple of minutes after Rubin captures the
original image.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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