Tag: Astronomy

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Cosmic Space

After the moon, astronauts look homeward – and outward

Stars sparkle in a photo of the Milky Way captured by the Artemis 2 crew. The Large Magellanic Cloud is visible at lower right. (NASA Photo)

After capturing more than 175 gigabytes of data during this week’s lunar flyby, the crew of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission turned their cameras toward the heavens — and turned their hearts toward home.

Pilot Victor Glover told journalists during today’s space-to-ground news conference that he’s been thinking about the return to Earth ever since the day that he was assigned to the crew in 2023.

“At one of the first press conferences, we were asked, ‘What are we looking forward to?’ And I said, ‘Splashdown.’ It’s kind of humorous, but it’s literal as well, that we have to get back,” he said.

From here on out, Glover and his crewmates — commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will be getting ready for their Orion space capsule to hit Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity of 24,500 mph and make a parachute-aided descent to a splashdown off the Southern California coast on Friday, April 10. Coverage of the crew’s return will be streamed via YouTube, with splashdown scheduled for 5:07 p.m. PT.

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Rubin Observatory team discovers 11,000 new asteroids

Visualization of asteroids discovered by Rubin Observatory in the inner solar system
A model of the inner solar system shows asteroids discovered by the Rubin Observatory in light teal. Previously known asteroids are dark blue. The model highlights almost 12,700 asteroids that the Rubin team has discovered over the course of a year and a half. (Photo: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / AURA / R. Proctor. Star map: NASA / GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA / Gaia / DPAC. Image Processing: M. Zamani / NSF NOIRLab)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s science team has discovered more than 11,000 new asteroids — a feat made possible by the Simonyi Survey Telescope’s advanced capabilities and data-crunching software developed at the University of Washington.

Rubin’s deluge of discoveries, based on a million early-stage observations that were collected over the course of a month and a half last summer, includes roughly 380 trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, and 33 previously unknown near-Earth objects. (Don’t panic: None of those near-Earth objects poses a threat to Earth.)

The data set also includes more than 80,000 previously known asteroids, some of which had been “lost” to science because of uncertainty about their orbits. The findings were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, the global clearinghouse for small solar system objects.

These aren’t the first finds for the $800 million observatory in Chile, which made its “First Look” debut last June. Astronomers previously reported finding more than 1,500 asteroids during earlier test rounds.

“This first large submission after Rubin First Look is just the tip of the iceberg and shows that the observatory is ready,” UW astronomer Mario Jurić, who heads Rubin’s solar system team, said in a news release. “What used to take years or decades to discover, Rubin will unearth in months. We are beginning to deliver on Rubin’s promise to fundamentally reshape our inventory of the solar system and open the door to discoveries we haven’t yet imagined.”

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Rubin Observatory revs up its astronomical alert system

Illustration: Data alerts on night sky with Rubin Observatory in the mountains below
Each night, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory issues thousands of alerts about changes in the night sky. (NOIRLab / NSF / DOE-SC Illustration)

An astronomical alert system developed at the University of Washington started off with a bang this week, sending out 800,000 notifications about moving asteroids, exploding stars and other celestial changes detected by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

That Feb. 24 surge was just the first wave. Eventually, the Alert Production Pipeline is expected to produce up to 7 million alerts per night. Astronomers will use the system to sift through the torrent of data, zeroing in on events ranging from newly detected asteroids to supernovas, variable stars and active galactic nuclei.

“Rubin’s alert system was designed to allow anyone to identify interesting astronomical events with enough notice to rapidly obtain time-critical follow-up observations,” Eric Bellm, a UW astronomer who leads the Alert Production Pipeline Group for the Rubin Observatory, said today in a news release. “Rubin will survey the sky at an unprecedented scale and allow us to find the most rare and unusual objects in the universe. We can’t wait to see the exciting science that comes from these data.”

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Astronomers hail observatory’s debut — and look ahead

Zeljko Ivezic with picture of Rubin Observatory
University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic talks about the Rubin Observatory in front of a photo of Rubin. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

It’s been more than two decades since the University of Washington helped kick off the effort to get the Vera C. Rubin Observatory built in Chile — and now that it’s finished, UW astronomers are gearing up to get in on the first decade of discoveries.

The university’s role in the past, present and future of the Rubin Observatory and its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, literally took center stage in front of a packed house at UW’s Kane Hall on June 26.

UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, who served as director of Rubin construction and is shifting his focus to his role as head of science operations for LSST, recalled the night of April 15, when Rubin’s first test images came in for fine tuning.

“We were all so happy, and we are still happy,” he said. “We had been dreaming about this night for two decades, and it finally arrived. And not only that, we quickly obtained beautiful data, but also we continued to do so, and every new image was better and better. The observatory is performing beyond all our expectations.”

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Rubin Observatory makes discoveries in its debut

This image shows a small section of the Rubin Observatory’s view of the Virgo Cluster, including two spiral galaxies at lower right, three merging galaxies at upper right, several groups of distant galaxies and many stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Click for a larger version of the image. (Credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)

After more than 20 years of planning and construction, astronomers celebrated the release of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory today — and also registered hundreds of the first discoveries from the world’s newest eye on the sky.

University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, a member of the Rubin team and director of UW’s DiRAC Institute, said that discovery data for 2,104 previously undetected small bodies in the solar system were reported to the Minor Planet Center early today.

Those small bodies include 2,015 main-belt asteroids, nine trans-Neptunian objects and seven near-Earth objects. (But don’t worry: None of those NEOs has a chance of hitting Earth anytime soon.)

“The over 2,100 asteroids we discovered are impressive, but just a drop in the bucket relative to what’s coming. We’ll have moments where we find over 20,000 in a single night, more than the entire world presently finds in a year,” Juric told me in an email.

“By sometime next year Rubin will double the number of known asteroids, then continue to discover hundreds of new comets, the remaining few dwarf planets, and maybe even a new planet in our solar system,” he said. “This will be the most comprehensive census of our planetary home in history.”

During today’s “First Look” briefing in Washington, D.C., astronomers explained the science behind their scan for asteroids — and showed off eye-pleasing imagery that included a colorful wide-angle view of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas in the constellation Sagittarius, galactic closeups gleaned from the observatory’s survey of the Virgo Cluster, and a zooming video scan of the same region of the sky.

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Fiction Science Club

Rubin Observatory throws a party to reveal first pictures

Long-exposure image of Rubin Observatory against night sky filled with star trails
A long-exposure image shows the Rubin Observatory beneath star trails. (Credit: Hernan Stockebrand via Rubin Observatory)

After more than 20 years of planning and construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready for its grand opening, and the world is invited.

The observatory in the foothills of the Chilean Andes features a monster of a telescope, with an 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror, coupled with what’s said to be the world’s largest digital camera.

It will survey the night sky every night for at least 10 years, producing about 20 trillion bytes of data every 24 hours. It would take you more than three years of watching Netflix, or over 50 years of listening to Spotify, to use that amount of data, according to the Rubin team.

The first images and videos are due to be unveiled on June 23, during a “First Look” webcast that will be shared online and at more than 300 in-person watch parties across the globe.

What will the images look like? Mario Juric knows, but he isn’t telling.

“I cannot tell you what’s on them, but I can tell you we just finished them, and they look amazing,” Juric, a member of the Rubin team and the director of the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute, says on the Fiction Science podcast. “I did not spend a day doing what I was supposed to be doing, because I just spent it browsing through the images. … I could teach an entire class by just zooming in on different parts of this image and explaining what this object is.”

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Software predicts a bonanza of solar system discoveries

Visualization of Rubin Observatory's solar system observations
A computer visualization maps small bodies in the solar system that are expected to be observed by the Rubin Observatory during its 10-year sky survey. Red indicates near-Earth objects, gold indicates main-belt asteroids, light purple indicates Jupiter Trojan asteroids, and deep blue indicates trans-Neptunian objects. The left image looks down from above the ecliptic plane, and the right image provides a side view. (Credit: Kurlander et al. / Sorcha.space / Univ. of Washington)

A new type of computer simulation predicts that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will discover millions of previously undetected objects in the solar system over the course of the coming decade.

The discovery campaign, which is due to begin in earnest later this year, should expand the known small-body populations in the solar system by a factor of four to nine, said University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, a member of the research team behind the open-source Sorcha simulation software.

“With this data, we’ll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot — and potentially deflect — the asteroids that could threaten Earth,” Juric said today in a news release.

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Cosmic Space

A cousin for Pluto? New dwarf planet candidate found

Three images of 2017 OF201
Images captured by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope between August and November 2011 zero in on 2017 OF201. (Credit: Cheng et al.)

Astrophysicists say they’ve identified an object beyond the orbit of Neptune that’s likely to qualify as a dwarf planet, alongside other trans-Neptunian objects including Pluto, the erstwhile “ninth planet.”

The discovery of 2017 OF201 touches upon another ninth-planet controversy: namely, whether there’s a large planet nicknamed Planet 9 or Planet X lurking somewhere on the edges of the solar system.

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Universe Today

Dazzling pictures celebrate Hubble’s 35 years in orbit

Four pictures from Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope's 35th-birthday presents include pictures of Mars, the Rosette Nebula, planetary nebula NGC 2899 and the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5335. Credits: NASA, ESA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

This week brings the Hubble Space Telescope’s 35th birthday — but instead of getting presents, the Hubble team is giving out presents in the form of four views of the cosmos, ranging from a glimpse of Mars to a glittering picture of a far-out galaxy.

It’s the latest observance of a tradition that goes back decades, in which NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute release pictures to celebrate the anniversary of Hubble’s launch into Earth orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.

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Astronomers process test images at Rubin Observatory

Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera
The Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera is the size of a small car. (Credit: Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / NSF / DOE / AURA / F. Munoz)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun generating test images of the night sky, thanks to the Simonyi Survey Telescope and its giant camera as well as a data management team that includes scientists from the University of Washington.

Team members started taking on-sky engineering data with Rubin’s LSST Camera on April 15, according to an update posted to an online forum for the Rubin Observatory research community by Keith Bechtol, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“The Data Management system successfully transported and processed the 3-gigapixel images at the US Data Facility within about a minute of acquisition,” Bechtol wrote. “The distributed Rubin team was jubilant, taking a few moments to celebrate the first few data acquisitions, and then quickly got back to work.”

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