Image: SuppliedA revolutionary new telescope showed off its first images of distant galaxies, and for South African scientists these new horizons will accelerate their research into the formation of the universe.
The Vera C Rubin Observatory has been more than a decade in the making and named after “The Mother of Dark Matter”, the American astronomer who is best known for her groundbreaking work on galaxy rotation curves. In the process, it provided key evidence for the existence of dark matter.
The observatory contains the largest digital camera ever built with 3200 megapixels capacity and the ability to transmit 20 terabytes to the US, the UK and France every evening - allowing for up to 10 million changes in the night sky to be recorded.
The first images from the telescope were live-streamed from Washington DC’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to the Iziko Observatory in the Company’s Gardens to more than 100 students and academics from several universities, including students from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in astronomy, physics and mathematics. They gathered in the Planetarium’s Digital Dome for an almost 360-degree view of the stars.
Image: SuppliedVera C Rubin Observatory will deliver the “Legacy Survey of Space and Time” (LSST) as it surveys the universe, giving astronomers the most detailed timelapse view of the night sky, with 800 images over 10 years. National Science Foundation chief of staff, Brian Stone, said more than 40 international organisations contributed to building the survey telescope which will gather more data than all other ground- and space-based optical telescopes in history combined.
US Department of Energy’s acting director for the Office of Science, Harriet Kung, said the treasure trove data set delivered by the telescope will give researchers unprecedented depth and clarity to the questions that drive fundamental research.
“These questions include: how can we understand the matter and energy that makes up 95% of our universe? Why is our universe expanding ever more quickly and how is that pattern changing over time? What role did dark matter play in how our university evolved? We anticipate that the observatory will give us many insights into our past, our future, and possibly the fate of the universe. Answering these questions is a challenge that is matched with the many, many talents that contributed to today's success in the survey,” said Kung.
Dr Michelle Lochner. Image: SuppliedUWC senior lecturer in astrophysics, Dr Michelle Lochner, said she was excited to finally view the images captured by the observatory, having been involved in the programme for over a decade.
“I think I had never really conceptualised just how big those images are until he showed us that. So it's really a phenomenal machine, and I really got excited about it from day one…And this is something that makes Rubin quite different.” said Dr Lochner.
The Vera C Rubin Observatory will have a multiplicity of uses, said Dr Lochner, from studying asteroids and better understanding the Milky Way, to understanding the changes in the sky, all the way down to Cosmology.
“So it's everything from the scale of, what's essentially to an astronomer, a tiny rock, an asteroid to the entire universe with one single ten year survey. That's what's really incredible about this project and incredibly ambitious,” said Dr Lochner.
To study the phenomenon of supernovae (collapsing stars), Lochner and her team developed machine learning algorithms to try to automatically tell the difference between types of supernovae.
“And that started a, you know, many-year long journey down the path of artificial intelligence. In this process, I started getting more and more involved in the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). By far DESC is the biggest LSST collaboration.
Prof Patricia Whitelock. Image: Supplied“There's over 1,000 of us from all over the world… there are quite a few different countries represented. And it's an extremely active collaboration. We've had to do a lot of work to try to be ready for when this telescope switches on,” said Lochner.
Dr Lochner and her group at UWC now pioneer the use of machine learning for anomaly detection in enormous datasets. “LSST will detect over 20 billion galaxies. That’s far too many for any human to look through. We’ve developed a collaboration between humans and machines to help us make exciting new scientific discoveries with LSST data.”
Prof Patricia Whitelock, an astronomer and former director of, the South African Astronomical Observatory and an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town, said: “Rubin Observatory will observe exactly the same sky as we do in South Africa with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) at Sutherland and the MeerKAT radio telescope, near Carnarvon.
