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Astronomers process test images at Rubin Observatory

Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera
The Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera is the size of a small car. (Credit: Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / NSF / DOE / AURA / F. Munoz)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun generating test images of the night sky, thanks to the Simonyi Survey Telescope and its giant camera as well as a data management team that includes scientists from the University of Washington.

Team members started taking on-sky engineering data with Rubin’s LSST Camera on April 15, according to an update posted to an online forum for the Rubin Observatory research community by Keith Bechtol, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“The Data Management system successfully transported and processed the 3-gigapixel images at the US Data Facility within about a minute of acquisition,” Bechtol wrote. “The distributed Rubin team was jubilant, taking a few moments to celebrate the first few data acquisitions, and then quickly got back to work.”

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Cosmic Space

Hubble gets a wide-screen view of Andromeda galaxy

Hubble panorama of Andromeda galaxy
It took 10 years to create the Hubble Space Telescope's 2.5-billion-pixel panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy. Science credit: NASA / ESA / Benjamin F. Williams and Zhuo Chen (Univ. of Washington) / L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern). Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Over the course of more than a decade, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to gather up 2.5 billion pixels’ worth of imagery focusing on the Andromeda galaxy — and the results could provide clues to the evolutionary history of our galaxy’s celestial neighbor.

The panoramic mosaic of the Andromeda galaxy was unveiled last week in Maryland at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and in an accompanying research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.

It’s not just a pretty picture. Hubble was able to resolve more than 200 million of the galaxy’s stars. “This detailed look at the resolved stars will help us piece together the galaxy’s past merger and interaction history,” University of Washington astronomer Benjamin Williams, principal investigator for the project, said in a news release.

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Rubin Observatory’s monster telescope takes shape

Rubin Observatory telescope mount assembly
The Simonyi Survey Telescope now has its mirrors and a camera in place. (Credit: Rubin Observatory)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile has now been equipped with all three of its mirrors, plus a camera for good measure.

Last week’s installation of the telescope’s combined primary/tertiary mirror represented a major milestone in the observatory’s 15-year-long design and construction effort.

“We have a telescope!” the observatory team declared in updates posted to Instagram, Threads, BlueSky and X / Twitter.

The wide-field survey telescope, which is named after Microsoft software pioneer Charles Simonyi, is expected to shed light on astronomical mysteries ranging from the nature of dark energy and dark matter to the potential existence of an as-yet-unseen “Planet X” in the far reaches of our solar system.

The telescope’s 8.4-meter-wide (27.5-foot-wide) primary/tertiary mirror makes use of a continuous surface with different curvatures that are designed to optimize image resolution inside a relatively compact support structure. The 3.4-meter-wide (11-foot-wide) secondary mirror was installed in July.

When it’s fully up and running, the Simonyi Survey Telescope is expected to generate 20 terabytes of data every night. But the current version of the telescope isn’t yet ready for prime time.

“This iteration has the commissioning camera — a smaller 144-megapixel version of Rubin’s huge, 3,200-megapixel camera — which is used for testing and troubleshooting,” the observatory team noted. “Rubin’s LSST Camera, the biggest digital camera in the world that will #CaptureTheCosmos in science operations, will be installed early next year after our summit staff complete the next round of tests.”

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Get a wide-angle view of the Simonyi Survey Telescope

Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Rubin Observatory
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope will make use of an 8.4-meter primary mirror and an 3.5-meter secondary mirror. Note the size of the support structure compared with the size of the workers on the platform. (Credit: Rubin Observatory / NSF / AURA / F. Munoz Arancibia)

Hubble. Webb. Chandra. Spitzer. Rubin. Roman. And now, Simonyi.

With the ramping up of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi joins a select group of scientists and technologists, policymakers and philanthropists who have had world-class telescopes and observatories named after them.

But here’s the thing: Technically speaking, the Simonyi Survey Telescope isn’t named after Charles Simonyi alone.

“The idea was to create something that carries the family name, and I was more thinking about my dad, Simonyi Károly,” Charles Simonyi told GeekWire, using the Hungarian manner of speech for personal names. “He was a professor at Budapest University. He wrote a wonderful book called ‘The Cultural History of Physics,’ which is available now in English at Amazon.”

Simonyi said his father was best-known for his work in popularizing science, “to make science understandable to the great public.” The physicist’s son arguably had an even greater impact on our computer-centric society by taking a leading role in creating Word, Excel and other tools for Microsoft’s Office suite of applications back in the 1980s. Four decades later, Word is still the world’s most widely used word processing software, and Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet.

Now the Simonyi Survey Telescope promises to have a similarly transformative and long-lasting impact on astronomy. Built at the Rubin Observatory on the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, the telescope will survey the full sky every three nights, generating about 20 terabytes of raw data daily.

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Cosmic Space

Webb Telescope expands the frontier of early galaxies

JWST image highlighting galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0
An infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument reveals the galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 as it existed 290 million years after the big bang. (Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STSci / B. Robertson, UCSC / B. Johnson, CfA / S. Tacchella, Cambridge / P. Cargile, CfA)

Astronomers say infrared readings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a new record-holder for the most distant galaxy observed in the universe — a smudge of stars whose light started its journey a mere 290 million years after the big bang.

The galaxy, known as JADES-GS-z14-0, dethroned the previous champion, which scientists detected in 2022. JADES-GS-z14-0 is thought to be about 40 million years older, based on a detailed analysis of spectroscopic data. Because the age of the universe is estimated at 13.8 billion years, the light from the galaxy took more than 13.5 billion years to reach JWST’s detectors.

Scientists also detected another galaxy, designated JADES-GS-z14-1, that was nearly as distant. And there are likely to be even more distant galaxies still waiting to be discovered.

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Universe Today

How did Pluto get its heart? Scientists suggest an answer

New Horizons view of Pluto
The heart-shaped region of Pluto's surface was formed at least in part by a cataclysmic "splat," scientists say. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

The most recognizable feature on Pluto is its “heart,” a relatively bright valentine-shaped area known as Tombaugh Regio. How that heart got started is one of the dwarf planet’s deepest mysteries — but now researchers say they’ve come up with the most likely scenario, involving a primordial collision with a planetary body that was a little more than 400 miles wide.

The scientific term for what happened, according to a study published today in Nature Astronomy, is “splat.”

Astronomers from the University of Bern in Switzerland and the University of Arizona looked for computer simulations that produced dynamical results similar to what’s seen in data from NASA’s New Horizons probe. They found a set of simulations that made for a close match, but also ran counter to previous suggestions that Pluto harbors a deep subsurface ocean. They said their scenario doesn’t depend on the existence of a deep ocean — which could lead scientists to rewrite the history of Pluto’s geological evolution.

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Universe Today

Scientists confirm that our galaxy’s ‘wave’ is waving

Radcliffe Wave model
This illustration shows how the Radcliffe Wave moves through the backyard of our sun (shown as a yellow dot). The white line represents the wave's current shape and motion. Magenta and green lines show how the wave is expected to move over time. (Credit: Ralf Konietzka, Alyssa Goodman and WorldWide Telescope via CfA)

Astronomers say there’s a wave rippling through our galactic neighborhood that’s playing a part in the birth and death of stars — and perhaps in Earth’s history as well.

The cosmic ripple, known as the Radcliffe Wave, was identified in astronomical data four years ago — but in a follow-up study published today in the journal Nature, a research team lays out fresh evidence that the wave is actually waving, like the wave that fans in a sports stadium create by taking turns standing up and sitting down.

“Similar to how fans in a stadium are being pulled back to their seats by the Earth’s gravity, the Radcliffe Wave oscillates due to the gravity of the Milky Way,” study lead author Ralf Konietzka, a researcher at Harvard and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA, said in a news release.

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Cosmic Space

Probes put planets on parade, from Mars to Uranus

JWST infrared image of Uranus
An infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows Uranus and its rings. (NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Andrea Luck CC BY)

Fresh imagery from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals the rings of Uranus in all their infrared glory.

The newly released view of the seventh rock from the sun is just one of the stunning shots of extraterrestrial scenes recently sent back by interplanetary probes. The past few days have also brought noteworthy images of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter lying dormant on Mars and volcanoes flaring up on a moon of Jupiter.

But wait … there’s more: Research based on readings from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is turning a spotlight on Mimas, a Saturnian moon that looks like the Death Star from the Star Wars movie. Could Mimas’ icy crust conceal a watery ocean? Stay tuned …

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NASA boosts far-out radio dishes and other wild ideas

Concept illustrations from NIAC Phase I projects
This collage highlights several concepts proposed by 2024 NIAC Phase I awardees. (NASA Illustration)

A proposal to build a far-flung set of radio antennas to measure the cosmos is one of 13 far-out concepts to receive seed funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

University of Washington astronomer Matthew McQuinn will receive a grant of $175,000 to flesh out his plan for a solar-system-scale interferometer capable of determining cosmological distances with precision that’s an order of magnitude beyond what’s possible today.

The plan would require building and launching a constellation of four radio dishes, each measuring at least several meters (yards) in diameter. The detectors would have to be widely separated, far out in deep space. How far out? “The science gets interesting when they are more than about 10 AU apart,” McQuinn told me in an email. That distance of 10 AU is just a bit less than the width of Jupiter’s orbit.

The detectors would be on the lookout for fast radio bursts that flash from beyond our Milky Way galaxy. By measuring the difference in arrival times at the different detectors, scientists could calculate the distance to the source of a burst with sub-percent precision. “It’s kind of like GPS localizations, but applied to fast radio bursts,” McQuinn explained.

In his proposal, McQuinn says such measurements could lead to new discoveries in fields ranging from gravitational-wave detection to the study of dark matter. McQuinn and a UW colleague, Kyle Boone, lay out the details in a research paper that was published last year in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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Asteroid-hunting algorithm passes a tricky test

Bird's eye view showing orbital paths for Earth and asteroid 2022 SF289 at closest approach
A bird’s-eye view of the solar system shows the orbital path for Earth in blue and the projected orbit for the asteroid known as 2022 SF289 at its closest approach in green. Orbits of Venus and Mars are shown in orange and red. (Credit: Joachim Moeyens / UW / OpenSpace)

A new technique for finding potentially hazardous asteroids before they find us has chalked up its first success.

In this case, the asteroid isn’t expected to threaten Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. But the fact that the technique — which uses a new computer algorithm called HelioLinc3D — actually works comes as a confidence boost as astronomers get set to step up the asteroid hunt with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

The University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute will play a leading role in analyzing the data from the Rubin Observatory, and HelioLinc3D is meant to make the job easier.

It’ll be another couple of years before the Rubin Observatory starts surveying the skies, but researchers put HelioLinc3D to the test by feeding it data from the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS.

During the July 18 test run, the algorithm combined fragments of ATLAS data from four nights of observations to identify an asteroid that had been previously missed.

The asteroid, designated 2022 SF289 and described in a Minor Planet Electronic Circular, is thought to be about 600 feet wide. That’s wide enough to cause widespread destruction on Earth in the event of an impact. The good news is that projections of 2022 SF289’s orbital path show it staying 140,000 miles away from Earth at its closest. Nevertheless, the space rock fits NASA’s definition of a potentially hazardous asteroid because of its estimated size and the fact that it can come within 5 million miles of our planet.

UW researcher Ari Heinze, the principal developer of HelioLinc3D, said the algorithm’s success should carry over to the Rubin Observatory’s future database.

“By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” Heinze said in a news release.

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