Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time begins

UK astronomers are celebrating the launch of the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) from a mountaintop in Chile. A milestone that the UK astronomy community has spent more than a decade preparing for, it’s the start of one of the most ambitious studies of the cosmos ever undertaken.

For the next ten years, the LSST will capture the entire southern sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe. This movie will help us solve some of the Universe’s biggest mysteries – such as the nature of dark energy, and the evolution of the solar system, Milky Way, and galaxies across cosmic time.

As a major international partner of the US-led Rubin Observatory, UK involvement is facilitated through a multi-million-pound investment by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Formed in 2014, the LSST:UK Consortium is made up of 36 partner institutions representing all major UK astronomy research groups. Researchers and software developers across the UK are addressing scientific and technical challenges posed by this revolutionary observatory.

Enhancing our understanding of the Universe

As part of the UK contribution, key innovations are expanding the scientific reach of the LSST. During its 10-year survey, Rubin will catalogue an estimated 17 billion stars, 20 billion galaxies, and millions of events that change in the sky – more objects than there are living people on Earth. With the survey expected to create up to 500 petabytes of data in its lifetime, the UK is playing a significant role in the management and processing of this unprecedented dataset. The UK's LSST data facility will process 25% of the data from Rubin, turning raw images of the sky into the calibrated data products with which astronomers can do science, and will operate a science platform capable of supporting analysis of those data products by 20% of the international LSST community.

Lasair event broker

The UK's LSST computing facility also hosts the Lasair event broker, a sophisticated software system supporting the near-real-time analysis of the alerts that Rubin issues whenever it detects a moving or time-varying celestial source. This alert stream - which can comprise millions of alerts per night and which includes a wide range of astrophysical objects, from nearby asteroids to distant supernovae - started flowing in February, ahead of the formal start of the 10-year LSST. The Lasair event broker was developed by The University of Edinburgh (including EPCC), Queen’s University Belfast, and Oxford University.

Somerville research cloud  

Operational since 2017 and jointly managed by EPCC and the Institute for Astronomy, EPCC’s Somerville research cloud hosts the UK's Data Access Centre, which will serve LSST science data to the international community throughout the survey. The service is designed to handle high-velocity and high bandwidth data streaming, combining class-leading networking and storage to enable unprecedented research capabilities. The service is a perfect fit for Lasair, providing scalable compute, 100 Gbps connectivity into the Janet academic network, and NVMe-based working storage.   

EPCC works closely with Professor Bob Mann, Professor of Survey Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, who is the Project Leader for UK participation in the Rubin LSST. Prof. Mann said: “This marks the start of the 10-year LSST, but it is more like the mid-point of our UK project. Researchers in the UK have been preparing for more than a decade for the data that is starting to flow and the contributions we are making will enhance the science that can be done with it over the coming decade or more by astronomers around the world."

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