Imaging the Dark Universe

The Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, or KIPAC, is an independent laboratory of Stanford University. Initiated with a generous grant from Fred Kavli and The Kavli Foundation, KIPAC is housed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and in the Varian Physics and Physics Astrophysics buildings on the Stanford campus. The lab is funded in part by Stanford University and the United States Department of Energy.

The LSST is a new kind of telescope. Currently under construction at Cerro Pachón, a mountain peak in northern Chilé, the LSST is designed to conduct a ten-year survey of the dynamic universe. LSST can map the entire visible sky in just a few nights; each panoramic snapshot with the 3200-megapixel camera covers an area 40 times the size of the full moon.

Images will be immediately analyzed to identify objects that have change or moved: from exploding supernovae on the other side of the Universe to asteroids that might impact the Earth.

In the ten-year survey lifetime, LSST will map tens of billions of stars and galaxies. With this map, scientists will explore the structure of the Milky Way, determine the properties of dark energy and dark matter, and make discoveries that we have not yet imagined.

Speaker: Prof. Aaron Roodman is Deputy Director of KIPAC and is SLAC's system scientist for the LSST camera integration and testing. Beginning in 2022, LSST's 3,200-megapixel camera will take snapshots of the night sky with unparalleled detail. Over its planned 10 years of operations, it will create an archive of tens of billions of cosmic objects and their movements – a treasure trove for researchers studying all kinds of astronomical phenomena, especially time-dependent ones.