Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s automated alert system is online and already bombarding astronomers with sightings in the night sky. The system went live publicly on Tuesday, February 24, and on the first night nearly 800,000 alerts were released about inviting asteroids, supernovae, and black holes. And that number is expected to rise to several million overnight.
The observatory released the first images taken by its car-sized Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera in June last year. But researchers and stargazers are eagerly awaiting the system’s launch. Each night, the camera takes about 1,000 images and then compares them to a reference image from when the telescope first came online. Differences are automatically flagged, and an algorithm can distinguish between a potential supernova and an approaching asteroid to send an alert to interested parties, all within minutes. This means that scientists can immediately turn their attention to celestial events.
Thankfully, warnings aren’t all or nothing. They can be filtered by event type, brightness, or even the number of events within a given time period. This should help prevent researchers from being overwhelmed by alerts as the Rubin Observatory continues to increase the rate of discoveries.
