Astronomers Wake Up to 800,000 Notifications From a Vera Rubin

[usonian]

https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-wake-up-to-800000-notifications-from-observatory-watching-the-night-skies-2000727018

The Vera Rubin observatory fired off its first wave of notifications from its new alert system on Tuesday night, sending 800,000 alerts to astronomers’ computers around the world. The Alert Production Pipeline, a software developed at the University of Washington, is designed to eventually produce up to 7 million alerts per night, documenting celestial events spotted by Rubin.

“The scale and speed of the alerts are unprecedented,” Hsin-Fang Chiang, a software developer at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and lead of operations for data processing at the U.S. Data Facility, said in a statement. “After generating hundreds of thousands of test alerts in the last few months, we are now able to say, within minutes, with each image, ‘Here is everything. Go.’”

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The first batch of notifications included detections of supernovae, variable stars, active galactic nuclei, and newly spotted asteroids in the solar system. Each alert signals something that has changed in a patch of the night skies since Rubin last looked, whether it’s a new source of light, a star that brightened or dimmed, or an object that moved.

A team of researchers and software developers has been working on the Alert Production Pipeline for the past decade, trying to figure out how to process 10 terabytes of images every night. “Enabling real-time discovery on such a massive data stream has required years of technical innovation in image processing algorithms, databases and data orchestration,” Eric Bellm, (Yes, Bellm. I checked) an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, who leads the Alert Production Pipeline Group for the Rubin Observatory, said in a statement.

Watcha going to do with a 3,200-megapixel camera?