Rubin releases its first images

You can’t have missed the news this week that the first images have been released from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, now operating in Chile. If you haven’t already seen them, have a look at the headline image released on Monday:

This is a photo of the Virgo Cluster, showing several prominent galaxies, including M49 (the biggest one, in the left hand part of the image) and a multitude of small galaxies and foreground stars. Astronomers like me have been waiting a decade while Rubin was constructed (and nearly a quarter of a century since it was first proposed), so naturally I was eagerly anticipating the release of the above “first look” image from the observatory. And, wow, does this ever showcase Rubin’s capabilities. This small version of the image really doesn’t do it justice. Check out the official Skyviewer app for an interactive version you can zoom in on.

Here’s that image again with the galaxies and bright stars labelled:

The brightest objects are labelled with their names, but you’ll notice the others don’t have labels. That’s because they don’t have names, because they have never been seen before. Rubin is the first telescope to see these objects. Not only that, but in the few nights of observing it took to produce this image (ten hours in total), Rubin managed to discover over 2,100 new asteroids. All from looking at one small patch of sky (which is about double the telescope’s field of view). It’s already made a ton of new discoveries, and it basically wasn’t even trying yet. This image is not part of its full schedule of operations. It’s just a demonstration. A hint of what is to come.

Rubin will make discoveries on every scale. It will find millions of asteroids and other Solar System objects, including those that could potentially threaten Earth. It will find gravitational lenses that let us study the distant Universe, potentially telling us about dark matter and dark energy in the process. And the bit I’m the most excited about: it will detect untold numbers of transient, fast-changing events in close to real time (things like supernovae, tidal disruption events, and gravitational microlensing).

Rubin is what’s called a survey telescope. That means it’s designed to rapidly take images of a wide field of view, and the plan is for it to photograph the entire southern night sky every three days in six different colour filters (doing two filters per night, so nine days between consecutive observations in the same filter). It is going to do that for at least the next decade, producing an unprecedented catalogue of how the night sky changes over that time. No previous survey has repeatedly observed the entire visible sky so frequently for such a long time. Not only that, but Rubin has the largest camera ever built (see below; it looks like a comically large DSLR camera lens) which will give it a much higher resolution than previous surveys. It’s going to let us see everything both more often and more clearly.

The data Rubin will produce is technically called time series data, and that’s exactly the kind of thing I work on myself. I’m near the start of my career, and I expect Rubin to play a role in more or less all the research I do from now on. As well as regular data releases, where the project will process, analyse, and package the data ready for astronomers to use, they will also send out nightly alerts to rapidly notify the astronomy community of anything that has changed in close to real time. This will revolutionise how we study the night sky and coming years are sure to be fascinating. A lot of us are very excited to start getting data from this facility; it will be a new workhorse for the whole of astronomy for years to come.

The full schedule of observations will begin later this year, with data expected to start flowing soon afterwards. Hopefully you’re as excited about that as I am!

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In the News

Solar System

• Expected radiation damage has not been found on Uranus’ moons, but a couple of them do appear to be surprisingly dusty because of micrometeorites. [Space.com, Earth.com, SciTechDaily]

• The Moon is covered in orange glass beads, left over from volcanic activity over three billion years ago. They were collected during Apollo, but have only been analysed recently thanks to modern technology. [WashU, Universe Today, Discover Magazine]

• The Proba-3 mission has successfully taken its first images of the Solar corona, by using a pair of spacecraft. One blocks the Sun so the other can take photographs. [New Scientist, Phys.org]

Galaxy

• A Saturn-like gas giant has been found orbiting a tiny red dwarf star. That’s an unlikely combination that might mean we don’t quite understand how planets form. [Universe Today]

• JWST, which is sensitive to infrared light given off by warm objects, has managed to detect one of the coldest exoplanets ever found. [SciTechDaily, Space.com, EarthSky]

• Like the recent story about the spin of the M87 black hole, similar analysis of the Milky Way black hole (Sagittarius A*) finds it is spinning at between 80% and 90% of the maximum. [New Scientist, ScienceAlert, Orbital Today]

• There’s a naked-eye visible nova in Lupus. It is not visible from here in the UK, but if you’re further south you may be able to see it. [Forbes, Sky & Telescope, EarthSky]

• A white dwarf has been found which is in a short-lived early phase when it is beginning to accrete matter from a stellar companion. [Live Science]

Universe

• JWST observations have found lots of small starburst galaxies in the early Universe. These galaxies produce ultraviolet light and might explain how hydrogen was first ionised, turning the Universe transparent for the first time. [Phys.org, Universe Today, ScienceDaily]

• A huge cloud of energised particles (known as a radio halo) has been revealed in new radio observations of a galaxy cluster 5 billion light years away. It is the largest one ever seen, 20 million light years across. [SciTechDaily, Earth.com]

• X-ray observations have found a supermassive black hole producing a high velocity wind, which is the result of more matter falling onto the black hole than it can consume. [Phys.org, Space.com, Universe Today]

• The European Space Agency has signed the contract for the LISA gravitational wave detector. Once built, LISA will consist of three satellites which use lasers to detect gravitational waves. [Orbital Today]

Finally

Enjoy this video showing some of the new asteroids detected by the Vera Rubin Observatory while producing its first image:

What is Three Alpha? Other than being the name of the newsletter you’re reading now, the name “three alpha” comes from the triple-alpha process, a nuclear chain reaction in stars which turns helium into carbon. Read more here.

Who writes this? My name is Dr. Adam McMaster. I’m an astronomer in the UK, where I mainly work on finding black holes. You can find me on BlueSky, @adammc.space.

Let me know what you think! You can send comments and feedback by hitting reply or by emailing [email protected].