SPACE — This year, the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is scheduled to become operational. VRO is planned to begin observations in December 2024.
What is VRO? VRO has a special role among other telescopes that have existed before. VRO is designed to photograph the sky widely and in depth for 10 years.
VRO’s main task is to detect changes in the sky and then notify other observatories to examine them in more detail.
By conducting repeated surveys of the sky, VRO will detect astronomical changes or transients. This type of observation is known as time domain astronomy.
If VRO finds something transient in the night sky, it will automatically send a notification to other observatories which will observe the transient object in detail.
Alerting other telescopes is just one of the functions of VRO. VRO’s main observing program is called the Legacy Survey of Time and Space (LSST).
LSST will record the entire sky by taking pictures every night for 10 years using its camera which has a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels. Every five seconds, the camera will point to a different part of the sky and take a 15-second exposure.
This decade-long effort will produce enormous amounts of data. This data will include 200,000 images per year, amounting to 1.28 petabytes of data.
Due to the abundance of data, the VRO project even included a new data path from its site in northern Chile back to the United States. To manage and discover what is hidden in this data, scientists will utilize machine learning.
The authors of a new study have developed a new method for observatories to detect anomalies in these large amounts of data.
The list of objects and events that will be detected by VRO covers everything that could be expected. In addition to supernovae and asteroids, VRO may find the elusive Planet 9 at the edge of our solar system.
VRO may also see kilonovae, gamma-ray bursts, variable quasars, AGNs, and even interstellar objects (ISOs) such as ‘Oumaumua and Borisov.
Autoencoder
Researchers have developed a specific type of neural network to process VRO-generated data. Neural networks are a form of artificial intelligence that mimic how the human brain works. In research published in The Astronomical Journal, the authors used a type of neural network called an autoencoder.
2024-01-24 10:06:00
#Vera #Rubin #Observatory #Years #Peeking #Sky #Hidden #Secrets #Space #Space