The press conference for the first release of images from the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory just wrapped. Granted, the embargo lifted at midnight this morning, so news outlets already posted their stories with the two ‘glamour shots’. Still, there was much to be said about the new telescope:
-The images were a field of Virgo galaxies (near M49), and a shot of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae.
-Instead of static graphics, the press conference included zooms and pans. The pixel scale of the images is too rich and detailed to convey statically, even on a monitor, much less a sheet of paper.
-A publicly-available app will let you do your own browsing, zooming, and panning of Rubin shots.
-The project showed a derived product: asteroid discovery plots. The raw data includes streaks in the “background” of other investigations; then, computers track a streak across consecutive images to confirm a moving object- an asteroid or comet. In the few days it took to gather the two glamour shots, there were thousands of such objects. ~1800 of those were known asteroids, and… 2104 were new discoveries. Rubin has already found 2104 new asteroids, and it’s not even fully commissioned yet.
-A second derived product was variable stars. Again, in the two existing fields, numerous objects were found (by computer algorithm) to have changed in brightness. The number of such stars, and the sensitivity of the image comparison, is beyond what a human could accomplish by looking.
-A panel of project staff held a question-and-answer session. Of note for this blog: interstellar objects were mentioned, multiple times. The expected yield is >10 ISOs in ten years, maybe 20.
-As with the browsing app, the project will invite citizen scientists to look through the images. This will be similar to/tied with the Galaxy Zoo volunteer effort.
-Less mentioned: if a Planet Nine is in the Solar System boondocks, odds are Rubin will see it.
-More vague, but more mentioned: many of the Rubin discoveries will be surprises- we don’t know what we don’t know.
-Astronomer and Rubin director Zeljko Ivezic was visibly excited- his work for the past 20 years is fully vindicating!
If you missed the press conference, you can read the press release on the rubinobservatory.org site:
rubinobservatory.org/news/first-imagery-rubin
…with clickable graphics and video. Or, you can re-watch the recorded presentation on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv22_Amsreo
The asteroid clip is watchable separately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTuq-vBsDJE
It has begun. How many asteroids, comets, transition objects, interstellar objects, and things we don’t even know about yet, will we see? We don’t even know, and that’s exciting!