Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Henrik Spoon
For this Summer’s Astronomy Roundtable on July 8, we invited Dr. Clare Higgs of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile to tell us about the extraordinary capabilities and mission of this ground based optical light observatory. We learned that, after a year of testing, the observatory had just started on its 10-year mission to scan the entire night sky every few days to create a time-lapse record of our Universe.
One single image, obtained with the largest digital camera ever built, might show 200 exploding stars (supernovae), 7200 variable stars changing brightness over time, 70 hungry supermassive blackholes, 400 asteroids, comets and other solar system objects, and other neat stuff that we don’t yet know about. Ten years from now, each part of the sky will have been imaged over 800 times, revealing changes across all time scales.
The amount of data generated will hover around 10 terabytes per night, requiring a good, stable internet connection to the servers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. After ten years the processed data will comprise 500 petabytes.
Near-real-time processed data will be released within minutes to days, alerting scientists of detected sky changes. This may result in up to 7 million alerts per night, speeding up the discovery of exploding massive stars (supernovae) and asteroids on collision course with Earth, allowing for timely follow-up observations.