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Fundamental Theory Seminar April 29, 2022 · 10:30–11:30

Preparing for Time-Domain Science with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory

Eric Bellm, University of Washington

339 Davey Lab, Zoom: https://psu.zoom.us/j/94169688126?pwd=R2tzK2xNQ1VCWFFOblp4Rmo1VVpRUT09&from=addon

When it begins full survey operations in 2024, the Vera C. RubinObservatory will conduct a powerful new survey of the Southern Hemisphere Sky: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Each LSST exposure will be rapidly analyzed by high-performance image processing pipelines. Transient, variable, and moving objects identified in the images will generate public alerts. Ten million alerts will be transmitted to community alert brokers nightly. This combination of intrinsic survey capability and rich data products will enable a broad range of scientific investigations, including searches for extragalactic transients, Galactic and solar system objects, and multi-messenger counterparts. I will provide an overview of the Rubin Observatory, its data processing pipelines and data products, and the expected commissioning timeline. I will highlight opportunities to engage with these efforts as well as relevant precursor science.

About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.