Big Data explosion: A New View of the Transient Sky with the Rubin Telescope - Livestream

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will begin surveying the Southern sky later this year, creating a paradigm shift in the field of high-energy astrophysics. Rubin’s LSST is expected to yield several million alerts (changes in brightness) per night, presenting a significant big data challenge. Many of these alerts are caused by transients ??" astronomical explosions that brighten and fade quickly over time ??" happening both in our galaxy and in other distant galaxies. The study of transients connects to a broad range of subfields across astronomy including the study of stellar evolution, galaxies, and astro-chemistry. Rubin’s unprecedented breadth and depth will enable the discovery of more than 100,000 transients per year, far more than other contemporary surveys combined, allowing us a unique opportunity to study populations of transients to answer many of the open questions in the field. In my talk, I will discuss how the enormous volume of Rubin alerts are produced, processed, stored, and disseminated to the community, the process of filtering and classifying explosions with Rubin data, the insights we may gain from population studies of transients, and the exciting possibility of finding weird and unknown transient phenomena in the Rubin stream.

Speaker: Shreya Anand, Stanford University

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