The much-anticipated Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released its first batch of astronomical alerts, and it’s huge.

A single night of observation on February 24th resulted in 800,000 alerts of ephemeral events in the night sky. Rubin is perched high on the Cerro Pachon mountain in central Chile. It works a little differently to the majority of telescopes: instead of homing in on a specific target, it scours the entire night sky every few nights to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high definition time lapse record of the heavens. It does this with the help of the largest digital camera ever built. It’s the size of a small car and weighs around 6,173 lbs. 

‘’By connecting scientists to a vast and continuous stream of information, NSF-DOE rubin Observatory will make it possible to follow the universe’s events as they unfold, from the explosive to the most faint and fleeting,’’ say Luca Rizzi.

The amount of data Rubin will generate is staggering. In the first year alone, the telescope is expected to capture images of more objects than all other visible-light observatories in human history combined. Once fully operational, the number of nightly alerts will jump from 800,000 to up to 7 million. The project is expected to run for at least a decade.

Automating the alerts from such a deluge has been a complicated take. In fact, there are now so many alerts that following up on all of them would be impossible. Instead, alerts are handled by a series of intelligent software platforms known as brokers. These systems use machine learning algorithms to filter, sort and classify the alerts before distributing them to scientific teams and observatories. The alerts are also cross-refenced with data from multi-wavelong astronomical catalogs.

‘’The broker teams have built systems that operate rapidly at scale so that scientists can find all of the objects of interest to them, as well as things we’ve never seen before,’’ says Tom Matheson (Community Science and Data Center), who developed the ANTARES alert broker, a type of software systems that ingests and processes astronomical alerts from the LSST and other surveys and serves them to the scientific community. ANTARES is one of seven official brokers, each ingesting all of the data that Rubin’s collecting and specializing in different aspects of that data. Typical broker functionality includes filtering, cross-match, photometric classifications, and prioritization for follow-up observations, all available in a web-based user interface for scientific analysis. The brokers can be accessed by anyone, including the public and citizen scientists. 

For professional scientists, Rubin and its alert systems are a game changer. Objects that used to be rare will become commonplace, and even rarer objects that could not have been discovered with the previous surveys will start popping up. Rubin is already making a difference to the study of supernovas.

‘’Even with the current alert system, we have identified transients that would be completely missed from any other survey operated until today, which is amazing,’’ said Georgios Dimitriadis. The first batch of alerts is the trickle before the flood. Once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is in full swing, it is not hyperbole to say that astronomy may never be the same again.