First Data from Vera Rubin Observatory Rewrites Astronomy (Starting Now)

In this exclusive interview, Professor Mario Jurić reveals how the Vera Rubin Observatory accidentally discovered 2,000 asteroids in just 10 hours while testing its capabilities on the distant Virgo Cluster—transforming humanity's asteroid discovery rate from 20,000 per year globally to potentially over one million annually with a single telescope. Jurić explains how VRO's revolutionary multi-messenger astronomy capabilities will detect dark matter's effects and light simultaneously, automatically slewing to capture cosmic catastrophes like black hole collisions within 30 seconds of detection. From mapping dark matter in galaxy clusters 54 million light-years away to building Earth's first comprehensive planetary defense system against asteroid impacts, this conversation explores how one observatory is about to fundamentally change both our understanding of the universe and our ability to survive in it. — Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 — Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 03:10 Mario’s reaction to the first data 04:13 Democratizing astronomy and citizen science 06:38 Technical details and capabilities 11:28 First look: A fly-through of the Virgo Cluster 21:42 Rubin and the Lambda-CDM model 28:22 How faint a sensitivity can Rubin achieve 33:03 Asteroid discovery revolution 37:52 Challenges of data analysis 41:38 Astronomy and AI 46:34 What kinds of civilization-changing discoveries might be hiding in the data? 50:48 Outro — Additional resources: 🔹Skyviewer App: https://skyviewer.app/ 🔹First Images from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory: https://www.youtube.com/live/dF1g-Ru8mjM?si=Y3-lKTSjZAH_oGHl — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 🔔 YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 📝 Join my mailing list:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ✍️ Check out my blog:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 🎙️ Follow my podcast:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Brian Keating?

  What you're about to see is an exclusive interview with one of the leaders of one of the most exciting observatories ever built, the Vera Rubin Observatory. In just 10 hours, you captured over 2,000 asteroids, which is something like 100 times faster than the discovery rate around the whole planet. Some of these asteroids could be earth killers, and that same technology is set to revolutionize our understanding of dark matter, peering into the massive Virgo cluster with unprecedented clarity.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  When you finally see the observatory, not anymore as a CAD rendering, but as something that is the actual map, you walk through it and then you see the images, it's phenomenal.

• 0:35Brian Keating?

  This isn't science fiction. It's the brand new Vera Rubin Observatory, a testament to the groundbreaking science and legacy of Vera Rubin herself.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Vera Rubin comes along and realizes, oh yes, like this is really becoming an evidence for dark matter.

• 0:50Brian Keating?

  With a gigapixel camera and unprecedented data analysis requirements. Mario Yurich is here to give us an exclusive glimpse into the data that was just released.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Everything we talked about today, you know, we're going to do this, do that, but that's probably not what Rubin is going to be famous for. It'll be something that's completely unknown.

• 1:07Brian Keating?

  Prepare to have your mind blown and expanded, because what you're about to see is just the beginning. What it holds in store will take us deep into the impossible. Welcome, everybody, for what is an exclusive, as far as I'm aware, interview with one of the leaders of the Vera Rubin Observatory, who also happens to be a tremendous individual scientist, my friend, Professor Mario Yurich of the University of Washington, where he is the director of their Dirac Center, which is a pretty awesome responsibility. But he's also responsible, and he and his group are responsible, for the software that discovers time varying and motion and objects in motion in the newly commissioned Vera Rubin Observatory. Mario, thank you for joining us, especially with this cool embargo data

• 1:51Brian Keating?

  that we're about to reveal, or it'll be unembargoed by the time people are seeing this. But thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Brian. I love the show. This is, it's really a pleasure to show, to show all this, all this to you and to your audience here.

• 2:05Brian Keating?

  And I should say you've been a great citizen and help to the Simons Observatory, serving on our executive external advisory committee, which has been phenomenally successful, thanks in part to your leadership. So, we're going to talk today about two aspects of just mind-blowing data that I've just had the opportunity to take a look at before we started the airing of the episode. And by the time people see this, it's right after the news conference, the huge news conference in Washington DC. And Mario, you've been having your own up there in Seattle. And we've just really blew my mind, looking at just a tiny fraction of the sky, and how you guys were able to discover an asteroid. In just 10 hours, you captured over 2,000 asteroids, which is something like 100 times faster

• 2:50Brian Keating?

  than the discovery rate around the whole planet in typical, you know, days and nights and weeks and years. So, this is going to be incredible. We're going to talk about that. And we're going to talk about an amazing fly through the Virgo Cluster, which is so incredibly granular that I felt like we could zoom in and like see my house if I had a house in, you know, in the Virgo Cluster. But before we get there, I want to get an overview from you. You've been working on this project for a long time. How does it feel to finally come to fruition? When you first saw the data that we're going to show the audience today, how did it hit you as a human being?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  It feels great. My first conference on, on what was to become Rubin Observatory was as a graduate student in 2006. So, I heard about in 2005. And I had saw my undergrads point out, you know, when I said, no, I mean, it takes a long time, but it wasn't that far ago. It was like in 2005. And one of my undergrads said, I was born in 2004. So, that's how long it takes to build these. So, when you finally see the observatory, not anymore as a CAD rendering, but as something that is on the actual mountain, you walk through it, and then you see the images, it's phenomenal. It's like, this must be what rocket engineers or astronauts feel when they finally sit in that rocket and launch into space. Like, that's what it felt. And the data were great. Like, that's the

• 4:07Speaker 01

  best part of it. Like, you build something, it takes 20 years, but then when it starts, it's, it just works. It's wonderful.

• 4:13Brian Keating?

  Well, the data really couldn't come at A better time. I mean, it's always a good time to get new data from a massive instrument like the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile. But in particular now, when we see the standard model of cosmology coming under assault. And I think that, you know, some of the data that you'll show and that your team and the other teams that will have access to this data, as will you out there, the audience, have access to it. I'll put links to the web browsers and other resources because all this is for citizens too, right Mario? This is not just for cloistered ivory tower denizens like you and me. This is for the whole world, correct?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the cool thing about this observatory. This is one of the first projects that started this whole new like what's now normal? When we started with Rubin, the whole idea was we built an observatory that has that uses open software and delivers open data and enables open science. This observatory is just maybe to give you viewers a little bit of an idea what we're talking about. It's an eight meter telescope, eight point four meter telescope. That's in the class of these largest telescopes that we have around these at this time. It's a it's in Chile. It's on Mount Pecol, Sierra Pachán, about forty kilometers from the coast of Chile, in the Andes, perfect place to put it.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  But what's different about it is it's not designed to zoom in on a single object and take like a really high resolution picture of a single object. It's designed to take the image of take images very rapidly of very wide field of view so we can cover the entire sky roughly every couple of days down there. And then what we do with this is we rather than, you know, have one person ask for an image of a particular object and then spend some time going in and taking it and reusing themselves. Because the telescope can cover the entire sky every three weeks, we affect that sorry, every three days, we effectively download the sky. We put it in the database and we let anyone use those images.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  So what we kind of do is we allow the entire USS Astronomical Community plus Chile, plus international partners to for every single astronomer in the country, basically to have their own eight meter telescope. That just happens to have image the entire southern sky and happens to be doing that every three nights for the next ten years. So You can just go ahead and do it and you don't even have to be a professional. Even amateurs can jump in on this. So that's really the hope. Download the sky and we'll let anyone try to figure out any kind of science that they want to with this data.

• 6:38Brian Keating?

  And that's what's so fascinating to me is yes, as a kid, having access to a two inch diameter telescope, you know, it seemed like I was the captain of my own observatory. And now, literally, as you say, we can actually, you know, treat this almost as if it's ours. It's not targeted. You don't have to submit proposals and so forth. So it's easier in some ways than the job that you had. And that's thanks to your hard work and that of the entire team. I want to talk about the, you know, galactic neighborhood that we find ourselves in. The Virgo clusters are giant, massive collection of galaxies, over a thousand of them, that Rubin has already observed and it's commissioning data. Now, we should say something, what do astronomers mean by, you know, first light look?

• 7:19Brian Keating?

  Or this isn't by no means, you know, all of what the Rubin Observatory is even comprehensively capable of doing. Talk about what were the data that we're about to show the audience? Where did that come from? How much total time elapsed? Was it on a calendar, say? And how much of the ultimate horsepower of Rubin is being displayed in what we're about to show?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Rubin has the largest digital camera in the world. It's 3.2 gigapixels. So I don't know what the latest iPhone is, probably like a few tens of megapixels. So you take that and you know, times 100 or times a couple of hundred. Every image, every frame that it takes, that's how big it is. On the sky, it's roughly three and a half degrees across. So, so you can put, what's that, about six or seven moons? You can tile them across the Rubin field. So that's how ultimately we'll be able to cover the entire sky. Now, the first image that we took with this telescope after 10 years of construction was in April 15th. So that's basically two months ago. The images that we're going to show for first look have been taken two weeks,

• 8:24Speaker 01

  or in some cases, less than two weeks, than that first image ever on a telescope. Now, those of you who have built telescope or used telescope know how both impressive and crazy this is. It usually takes a couple of months to get. Everything tuned up before the images to start flowing from the telescope. But we managed to get it done in something like two weeks. To the point where we can take many images of a small section of the sky. And we picked the Virgo cluster because it's litter with galaxies. It looks beautiful and it allows us to test all the software. In addition to what the public and all the scientists see that the telescope works. So we took about three fields of view worth of data. So like imagine three images with this big camera.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  One, two, three slightly overlapping, I should say, three pointings. And then we took about eighteen hundred images over those three pointings. When you add up how much time that took, it's the impressive thing is it's only about ten hours. So when we run in operations, what we're going to show you, we can build up that kind of image in about a, maybe in two nights of observing. That is the sort of thing that when the telescope operates fully later this year, we'll be doing across the entire sky. So what we're showing you right now is just a small piece and with emphasis on going very deep. But when the telescope is really operational, we'll be able to give you an image like that that goes over the entire sky. When you look at this and you think to yourself, well, look how many stars, look how many galaxies.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  What you're looking at is about five hundred times smaller than the ultimate dataset. So, so what we're going to showing you is zero point two percent of what we'll ultimately have.

• 10:03Brian Keating?

  Before my audience, you know, goes crazy screaming at the screen, wanting to see the data. Let's take a look at the Virgo fly through, which just kind of left me with a sense of vertigo. A Virgo vertigo, you know, flying through it, zooming in on it. I know people are going to enjoy it. So this is about a quintillion stellar mass object, if you will, the Virgo cluster, about a thousand, a plus thirteen hundred, maybe galaxies in a cluster not too far away, tens of megaparsecs away. And it has each one of which could be like the Milky Way, like Andromeda, a hundred billion stars within each one perhaps. And because of that, this just mind boggling amount of dark matter. And so we're going to see things in it that we never saw before by sheer quantity, but also the quality.

• 10:46Brian Keating?

  Quality of the images are just truly breathtaking. I mean, and then later we're going to talk about the time domain sky. So the first batch of scientific data that we're going to show from Rubin comes from the team that works on extragalactic and cosmology and then Mario's specialty or time domain things that go hopefully not bump into the earth but could and transient astronomy and the all the things that can change in time, including asteroids that we'll talk about and you reminder can win a fragment of the early solar system and asteroid fragment called a meteorite. You're guaranteed to win one if you have a dot edu email address. If you go to briankeating.com/edu or if you don't have one, you might win one at briankeating.com/yt.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  So everyone ready? Okay, first first look. Here we go.

• 11:30Brian Keating?

  Yep, got the elliptical galaxy on the screen.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 11:35Brian Keating?

  Can we see like naked eye like lensing or is that a figment of my imagination?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Probably not at this scale, but if we started zooming in, I bet we could find something that's lensed. You could spend and this is not a hypothetical. You could spend weekends staring at this image and just zooming, moving around.

• 11:51Brian Keating?

  I'm making my zoom background. I'm literally making my zoom background as we speak.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  So in case you're wondering, there are between five and 10 million objects in this image. And I'm just going to pan and scan around a little bit. So what this big blob in the center, that's that's M49. That's the big, supermassive elliptical galaxy. It has a massive black hole in the center. It's radio. It's a it's active in the radio. It's well known. It's at about 56 million light years away from us, if I remember correctly. And I'm going to just to give you a sense of what you're looking at. Look at this this note down here. It says you're looking at one half of the Rubin field of view. So from left to right, right? Like this is not an even a full

• 12:38Speaker 01

  image of one single image of what Ruben can do. So let's zoom out. And now we're starting to see what the what Ruben field of view is. So it's from here to here. So this, let's imagine if you if I took a circle around here, like that's one Ruben field of view. And remember that I said that we took three of them and just. Added them together and that's this is the image. So there's one up here, one down here, one down here. And this is our Virgo cluster. These are thousands, probably tens of thousands of galaxies and large galaxies that we can see. And then millions of smaller galaxies. So we can just go and zoom in at a couple of these places and see what,

• 13:21Speaker 01

  like see how deep this telescope goes. Now, note as I zoom in, how the resolution changes. This this web viewing software that we have works the same way as Google Maps. You you move in and you you get better and better resolution. And you see even more and more objects. So so this blob in the foreground is the M forty nine galaxy. There there's a ton of things behind it. Like, look at all these little dots. Each one of those dots that that is behind this galaxy and its light is coming through us. Now, some of them are clearly extended. So these are galaxies of their own. Here's one. Some of them look just like dots, like stars. But they aren't. Most of these things that you see, the vast majority of these things that you see are even more distant galaxies.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So everything here that you see is billions and billions of stars.

• 14:10Brian Keating?

  It's amazing. I'm just looking up some of the facts while you're talking about M forty nine. It's the second most massive galaxy after M eighty seven. It was discovered in seventeen seventy one by Charles Messier, who was not looking for galaxies, right, Mario? He was looking for comets. And things that could be mistaken for comets. And it turns out Ruben's pretty good at finding those too. We'll talk about those later. But I just looked up the mass of the black hole in the center, five hundred and sixty five million solar masses. It's a hundred and thirty times bigger than our galaxies. It has six thousand globular clusters. I'm sure we're seeing some of those here, right?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  It's a galaxy with, I I think the most global clusters.

• 14:49Brian Keating?

  That's right. A hundred and fifty in the Milky Way and six thousand in M forty nine. Amazing.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  So some of these dots here are those global clusters in the galaxy. And this is like, I mean, this is the thing, right? Now. All of us astronomers can take these images and take these data and go do whatever science we care about. If we're working on globular clusters, here's probably the best and deepest survey of globular clusters in this galaxy or around this galaxy. And the cool thing is, we actually don't name anything because M49 is, or we don't aim for anything in specific, we just take the entire sky. M49 is just one of these big galaxies, but there's its neighbor over here. There are many other galaxies. So why would you just study globulars around M49? You can go and study them around everything. That's the idea with this survey science type

• 15:39Speaker 01

  work. So here's a nice galaxy with a spiral that looks like it underwent some kind of interaction. So now all these stars are getting stretched out and tidally torn away from the galaxy. Now we can move around and there's a, look at this one. So there's something different about this galaxy relative to the previous one. Now, this is where I would ask my students, what is different about this galaxy? Look at its color. We're looking at M49 and it was yellow and not much is happening. That galaxy in terms of new stars forming is fairly dead. There's whatever formed, formed, few new stars are forming. This galaxy is very

• 16:22Speaker 01

  much alive. Look at all these spirals. Look at all these blue dots. Whenever you see this blue tea of color, what that tells you is their star formation. These are places where millions of stars are being born right now. And the fun thing to me is that we can just look at an image like that and point and say, oh, star formation. Oh, look at how many stars are being formed. And then we can take our tools, we can get a little bit more quantitative about it, measure star formation this galaxy, measure star formation other galaxies on this image, and understand how stars form throughout the history of the universe. So this is the kind of thing that you can do, that we will be doing scientifically with these kinds of

• 17:03Speaker 01

  images. But at this point, it's just so much fun to be able to go around and just to recognize all these phenomena that we've learned from textbooks or taught our students in textbooks. But here's another one. This is a face-on spiral galaxy. I think this one's NGC 4535. It's a fairly nearby galaxy. I think this is about 50 million light years as well. It's a spiral. Our Milky Way might look somewhat like this. There's a little bit of a bar in the center. And then look at all these spiral arms. And where are the stars from? Look at all these blue dots. They're right on top of spiral arms. It's exactly what we expect. And then there's just almost no empty space in these images. Like I go, I zoom in here and there's another spiral in the background.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And like all these dots are likely galaxies that are in the background. So it's just, you know, we haven't, as I said, these are three fields of Rubin. And each night will cover about 1,000 pointings. So each night we get 300 tons more in terms of area.

• 18:05Brian Keating?

  Is there any easy way to see what are, say, Milky Way stars as you can in the Hubble Deep Fields? Or in the Webb Deep Fields with, you know, six or eight pointed, you know, diffraction spike? I can't, I don't see anything with diffraction spikes here.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  These are, these images, so here's a star. Anything that's very bright and round is likely to be a star. So in here, what you're going to see is, because this image, again, remember, we took three pointings, but a total of 1,800 images. So this image is what we call a coadd. So you add all those images together. And every pointing, every image is taken with a slightly different angle. So those diffraction spikes yet averaged out into these kind of thorn-like patterns, if you will. So if I zoom in, you know, you can almost, yeah, you can see them. And there was, there was a set of observations taken with the fraction spikes

• 18:58Speaker 01

  going in this direction and then another side in this and other than this. And when you add all that together, you get these kinds of patterns. The other cool thing about this to me is if you want to see a shock wave, there's a, where is, this is, this one's my favorite. So, so this here is, oh, what are these called? This is one of the NGCs, a well-known class, the NGC 4410 Galaxy Group. And all of these are interacting. So this galaxy is interacting with this one. And you can see this like thin bridge of stars going from here to here. And that's probably because these galaxies, well, definitely interacted, maybe collided.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  But the fun thing with this galaxy, when I zoom in, you can see these kinds of shockwave-type shells of stars. These are all stars. These are millions and billions of stars that are that that got shocked into this configuration as this galaxy interacted with the galaxies above it. I've seen this before in simulations, like, but to see this well on on actual data is just phenomenal. So all these simulations that we're doing over the last couple of decades, now we're going to have literally billions of galaxies to test against. Anyways, it's a it's just a phenomenal dataset, and I encourage like all your viewers, you can go to this website, you can just go and browse it yourself. That's the neat thing about this. There are other things in here like how

• 20:20Speaker 01

  color tells you how far objects are. Virtually, if you zoom in, anything that's red and faint, it's not red because it's intrinsically red, it's red because of redshift. It's red because of distance. So if you find a little cluster of red dots, that means you've found you've likely you've likely found an extragalactic, very distant cluster of galaxies. I'm looking at these and just waiting for the for the high resolution to load. That's more likely than not just distant cluster of galaxies.

• 20:47Brian Keating?

  What is the spectroscopic capability of Ruben? How is that? And what kinds of bands are used in the optical? And how far out do you go in either direction?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  It's an optical telescope. It's photometric, so we don't have a spectrograph on it. There are six bands, U, G, R, I, Z, Y. So U is roughly near ultraviolet. G is roughly green, R is roughly red, and then you get into infrared. And then you get into three kind of levels of infrared with Y bands being around a micron. Near infrared to near ultraviolet, we cover the entire visible spectrum. This is the capability that lets us, like, remember when I said, oh, we could star formation these galaxies? And because it's blue, this teal color, that's the U band. Blue comes spectacularly from the U band, so because these stars become very, very bright in in ultraviolet and a blue part of the spectrum. And we've got the bands to to detect that.

• 21:42Brian Keating?

  So before we move on to asteroids and transients and comets and all sorts of other things, I do want to spend some time thinking about cosmology and the possible, you know, import of Ruben on the ever-evolving.

• 21:57Brian Keating?

  Understanding of Lambda CDM model. Just posted a video with Kyle Dawson, who was a former spokesperson for DESI. And, you know, he's pretty making a makes a pretty strong case that Lambda CDM, where Lambda is a cosmological constant, is in trouble. And I do remember, you know, one of the original titles for Rubin was L S S T. And it was going to have a lot of things to say about Lambda CDM. And that is now a component, the survey's name, if I understand it right, the L S S Large

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Earlier name of the telescope was the D M T, the Dark Matter Telescope. And the joke is kind of an internal joke, because it was going to try to figure out what dark matter is, which is a big part of Lambda CDM. And the other dark matter, which were these distant objects in the solar system that that very few were found at the time, 20 years ago, when transmuting objects were still a new curiosity. So then there was a realization from two very different groups of astronomers that, hey, we can build a telescope that where the same telescope is going to answer those two very different questions.

• 22:58Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  But like, going to cosmology, the idea with Rubin is that even before all this, all these tensions started arising, we still have the big question of what is the 96% of energy in the universe? So everything we're seeing here, like I'm just, you know, as you were talking, and I'm looking at this image, all this beautiful Gaussian interaction, so on and so on, like that's just matter. That's just matter and photons. It's 4%. Like, these, these galaxies here, in terms of just mass, what you see here is roughly what, like 10% of what's actually out there, dark matter to matter ratio. So there's 10 times more dark matter here that we just don't see.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And we infer it through interactions of these galaxies and through exactly the details of what these bridges between galaxies looks like when they collide. So Rubin was designed to go and take large enough sample of galaxies through the cosmic evolution, through cosmic time.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  To try to answer, what is the nature of dark matter? And then what is the nature of dark energy? So the idea is to try to see if dark energy actually is consistent with the cosmological constant, or if we have to modify the theories somehow. And as we were building the telescope, the evidence has started accumulating that there's something more than just plain old Lambda. And like, the timing could not have been perfect. Towards the end of the year, we'll start collecting data. And I think in about, it'll take probably about a year or two to get to sufficient numbers to start replicating results that are coming from DES or from DESI. And then by the time, you know, we get to year four or five, something's really off with Lambda CDM. We should be able to tell.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And so like, the timing is perfect.

• 24:47Brian Keating?

  I have a very, you know, soft spot in my heart for Vera Rubin, obviously. Many people don't know, she was actually here at UCSD in 1965, 66 and 67, working with Margaret Burbidge, my late, great colleague, Margaret Burbidge. She was here for two years as a postdoc, and she actually learned how to do rotation curve measurements from Margaret. Margaret was the astronomer, Jeff was a theorist, and didn't much care for cosmologists anyway, as I would later learn. But her, you know, kind of proximity to Palomar Observatory here, where she would do research, following in Margaret's footsteps in many ways. It's funny, because I have plates that Margaret took of galaxies in spectra, of course, that she used to measure rotation curves. But, and Margaret published on this,

• 25:30Brian Keating?

  but she never really made the connection that Vera and Kent Ford and others did. What is the kind of sentiment around, you know, Vera Rubin and so forth? Is there any connection with her family? She had four children, I believe, and some of whom are very active in terms of promoting her legacy beyond, you know, the Nobel Prize that she was snubbed for, which I mentioned in my book. But tell me about the connection to Vera Rubin, and just on a human level, what this means to astronomers, not just, you know, the technical, but also people that are underrepresented in astronomy as well.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  This is the connection. And you asked me about one of the big things this telescope wants to, or this hope to achieve, which is some understanding of, better understanding of cosmology and that it more is. Includes dark energy and dark matter. And if you when you learn about dark matter, you'll learn about Fritz Wiki and then you'll learn about Vera Rubin. And you know, this Wiki had this quote unquote crazy idea that now something's off. I'm looking at all these clusters. They're moving way too fast galaxies and clusters. There might be something there that we don't quite understand, but it's, you know, like one interesting curiosity. And Vera Rubin comes along and measures the rotation curves of a large set of galaxies. And then realizes that, oh, wait a minute, that thing that that seemed to be like some odd curiosity in the beginning.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I'm seeing something similar at a very different scale and connects the two and realizes, oh, yes. Like this is really becoming an evidence for dark matter that's hard to sidestep or explain elsewhere. And she just starts this whole, I think, revolution in our field because like you've got to remember. In the 50s or 60s, you you look out in the universe and what is what's there? That's what you think, like no one's thinking that there's this unseen component that that comprises 90% of all matter in the universe. Right now, we take it for granted and like at the time, that's a huge paradigm shift. That's what she did. She provided crucial pieces of data and insight to be able to say our universe isn't what we think it is.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  It's actually only 10% of what's out there. So the name this telescope after her was super appropriate. Her children were very much involved in that. I think they were there at the naming ceremony. I think it was, yeah, it's 2020 in W S Hawaii, a meeting. This was, I remember that meeting because it's the last meeting before we all went into lockdown for the next couple of years. This was the last time many of us traveled for a few years. And they don't know if Vera's children are going to be in at the unveiling of these specific images. But they've been very supportive, both at the observatory of, you know, us trying to honor Vera with the name. And I mean, just honestly, she is, she's deserved it for both of the work in dark matter, in science.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And the fact she was the first female faculty astronomer at Georgetown at her university, opened up the field. It's a much broader set of people, just a phenomenal person. And like having to tell us who manned after her is it was a no brainer.

• 28:22Brian Keating?

  I'm just looking up some of the facts about the survey design, 18,000 square degrees, alternating between deep and wide latitude coverage is mostly southern hemisphere, but obviously, you know, Virgo, we can see in the northern hemisphere tonight. Actually, if you are willing to take out your telescope and it's not too cloudy, you see thousands of fields thousands of times over the next decade. Where does this fit in to say an instrument, you know, in the portfolio of instruments from the Keck telescopes that we have access to here, 10 meter diameter telescopes in Hawaii. How do they kind of, you know, five sigma point source detection limits in the R band of 25 magnitudes or so for galaxy detection,

• 29:03Brian Keating?

  24 for asteroid detection? What does that mean to a layperson? Let's describe that. How faint sensitivity can Rubin achieve? And is there some way to characterize that compared to what an amateur astronomer, a brilliant amateur astronomer member of my audience, might be able to appreciate?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  The naked eye sees roughly down to six magnitude, six or seven, like depending on, my eyes definitely don't see seven anymore. Every magnitude is two and a half times fainter than the previous one. So amateur telescopes, let's say a semi-professional class, half a meter will take you to 20th, 20, 21st, if you really spend a lot of time. With Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we could regularly go to about 22 and a half. That is 20 to 22 and a half. That's I've six times fainter, but over the entire sky. Here we're going another roughly three magnitudes deeper. So from 22 to 25 in 30 seconds. This is, these are 30 second

• 30:04Speaker 01

  exposures. So that's the difference. It's a single exposure that's 30 seconds. You could almost hold up your own, you know, phone camera for 30 seconds and be still enough to take an image, not hours. And then we're not just doing one.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Thirty second exposure and then moving on and never come back, but we come back every three nights and then we can add those together over 10 years. So that's roughly about a thousand images of every pointing in the sky that you can add together. So you take that, take those numbers, so that's got to be a thousand images, 30 seconds each, that is 500 minutes. So, so that, that ends up being almost, what, 10 hours? At that point, you get to 27th, 28th magnitude. So these are the kinds of things that you could look up, things like Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you know, like things where, where major national projects to get to just a small sliver of the sky to go that deep.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  By the time Rubin has finished observing, we'll have that over half the sky. And again, this is a data set that then, that as it builds up, is available to everyone. So it's not just half the sky to that magnitude for me and you, it's for like every astronomer that has a good idea.

• 31:19Brian Keating?

  And here's what really blows my mind about this whole discussion, you know, we're talking about the Virgo Cluster 56, you know, plus mega parsecs away, just incredible. We can start talking about redshift, you know, a few point 005 or something like that. We're now in the Hubble flow, getting close to a 54 million light years distant, accidentally discovered by a comet seeker. And something that might not have occurred to many people is that this instrument which can do cosmology, galactic science, what I was researching before the call, these mergers that you talk about, astronomers call them galactic harassment, you know, which is just quite a silly name in my opinion, but in just that 10 hour period of looking at the

• 32:01Brian Keating?

  sky around Virgo, Rubin found 2,000 new asteroids, 2,000, let that sink in out there. In 10 hours, that's, you know, if you just do the raw math, one every 18 seconds. And to put this in perspective for the viewers, you know, the entire world in a given year might discover only 10 times that. Rubin, in 10% of that time, in a single night, equivalent of a single night, while it wasn't Death, you know, is on the menu to detect these things, but it was doing other things. It was sort of serendipitously while it's looking at galaxies billions of times farther away than anything in our solar system. And what's terrifying in some sense to me is that we know of the locations of only about 30,000 asteroids.

• 32:46Brian Keating?

  Most of them are harmless, but based on what Ruben has demonstrated, there could be maybe a million asteroids out there that we have absolutely no idea about, nothing about their properties, their mass, their size, their trajectories, and we're flying blind through this cosmic shooting gallery and we didn't really know about it. So Mario, when Ruben fully goes operational soon and starts its systematic sweep of the accessible sky, we're going to be in for a shock based on what you showed me. So can we take a look now at some of the time varying, the asteroid discovery revolution? There's no other way to really describe it, right?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  It's crazy to me that we can build, we now have the technology and the computing and the software to build a telescope where the same telescope gets used by you and me. So you in the sense cosmologist, you know, somebody who cares about the universe as a whole and me with my current hat on, I'm super interested in the solar system and it's exactly the same data set. So let me show you this, I zoom back in on M49 and like one of the things you see here is that like these are mostly galaxies, some of these dots are stars, is a big galaxy. There are no asteroids here. We spent a lot of time carefully removing them from these images. So I'm going to go and show you the image with the asteroids. Look at all these little lines that you see here. There's a line here, there's a line here. So what that, there's a line here.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  What that is, what those are asteroids. And remember, these images are produced by taking a number of exposures, number of snapshots of the sky and then adding them together. And we can do that because galaxies don't move, at least not fast enough. Asteroids do. So as we take these snapshots, asteroids move from point to point to point to point. And that's why instead of them all, you know, nicely posing for us statically on a single image and combining themselves to their real color like individual. Color images get spread out like this. And instead of one dot, you get a little trail. So this here is one of many asteroids. You don't even try to remember their names anymore. Here's another one. And they're everywhere.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  They're like, you can't like, this is one, this is one. There are many, many faint ones that you don't even see that don't survive this coaddition process.

• 34:57Brian Keating?

  It's appropriate. When I look at that, I think, you know, the famous phrase, my God, it's full of stars. And that's from Arthur C Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey, which is where the pod bay doors over there comes from. But it's also where the word podcast comes from, right, Mara? Did you know that?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 35:14Brian Keating?

  Vinnie Sorico is an engineer at Apple who showed Steve Jobs the prototype iPod. And remember it had that little circle on it, you know, kind of like, and it looked like one of the pods in 2001 A Space Odyssey. So, you know, my podcast Into the Impossible, named after Arthur C Clarke's famous phrase, the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go into them in beyond them into the impossible. So it doesn't appear in the film, but it does appear in the book. My God, it's full of stars. When I see these images and you're about to see them out there, I say, my God, it's full of asteroids.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  I was so tempted to reply. It's actually full of galaxies, but we're not allowed to say anything about what is beyond a show.

• 35:53Brian Keating?

  Well, now, if none of this comes out, you are.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Both asteroids as well. So this is an asteroid crossing over background galaxy. So here now, we're not coadding all those images, but we've, we've put them together in a movie. And you can see it floating by. And now you're going to ask me like, what are all these gray things that that come in on the sides and so on? Well, sometimes the camera is going to be right at the edge or the asteroid is going to be right at the edge of the camera. And that's where a piece is missing. Sometimes we're going to get a satellite trail coming across. And that's where, where you might see like a long tail missing. Like you're kind of seeing here how the sausage is made a little bit, which to me is fun, but that's like a quarter worth of a course to discuss the details. But here's our asteroid. And as you said, we found about.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Three thousand eight hundred of them, of which eighteen hundred are known, and some, I think, three thousand nine hundred, of which eighteen hundred are known, and about one thousand, two thousand one hundred are unknown. And so for every known asteroid, we see an unknown one. So that means if you just extrapolate, you just assume that's how things are going to be for the next year. That means we're going to take a circle around the sun with the Earth taking us around. And if for every known asteroid, we find one more, we'll double the number of known asteroids in about a year. And it's actually going to be better. Because remember how I told you that these images that we took? They were all taken within two weeks of the first ever image taken by this telescope.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  This was before we tuned the telescope. The telescope is not even fully in focus yet. We can do better. So everything that I showed you is just, you know, engineering data that we're using to actually tune everything. So like just take that and multiply it by some factor. We expect to go from one and a half million known asteroids today to about five million by the time Ruben is done.

• 37:53Brian Keating?

  Talk about the challenges of data analysis. What are you facing here? You're a known expert in this field of huge amounts of data processing. What's going into it? Is it, you know, a single grad student, you know, coding in Python? Is it some, you know, vast GPU cluster somewhere? What are the computing hardware and software requirements? And just data management of this vast data set?

• 38:15Speaker 01

  To give you a sense of things. Sloan Digital Sky Survey was one of the groundbreaking surveys early in the 21st century. It imaged, I think about, in the end, about 60% of northern sky. A lot of first results about barren acoustic constellations came from, and about understanding the cosmic power spectrum came from SDSS. It's as well cited as the Hubble Space Telescope. Hugely impactful. Sloan took about 10 years to collect 20 terabytes of imaging data. Ruben does that every night. So, and we're going to do that for about 3,000 nights. So in terms of computing, we're going to be accumulating on order of six petabytes of raw data per year.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  When you perform the analysis, that expands by roughly between a factor of five and 10. So, so we're going to be generating data sets that are on order of 30 petabytes or more every year. So over the full 10 years at 60 petabytes. The kind of computing that you need for that right now, for real time computing, things that have to happen during the night. It's a relatively small cluster. It's only about, we only need about 2,000 cores. For the large scale, like, like what I've shown you, take all the images, add them together, understand the shapes of galaxies, understand where dark energy comes from. There you're coming into tens to hundreds of thousands of cores, working in unison to, to process these data sets.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  So just a raw compute is significant. That compute that those CPUs have to run something. And we, we spent about the last 10 years or so working on algorithms to really find all the asteroids, find the comets, find the variable stars, measure shapes of, find the galaxies, measure shapes of galaxies, understand how they had evolved through time. By this point, I think that's somewhere around seven or eight million lines of new code. Most of it is in PyCon with the key components that have to run fast in, in C plus. The number of people who have worked on Ruben data management, the group is on order of 200 people. That, that includes everything from hardware to software.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  In software alone, I think we've got about 50 or 60 people working on it. Most of these are PhD astronomers. This is a very unique field. It requires you to understand the astronomy and to understand the software engineering to put all this together. And then this is spread out over about half a dozen institutions in the US. And the computing itself is very much an international project. And so the, our main computing center is at Slack, then in California, with two computing centers in Europe. One in the UK and one in, in Lyon, France. Then you can imagine all the networking that it takes, the team of data around and so on. This is really, you know, the project I would compare this to is maybe something like LHC, the, the Large Hadron Collider and how they do. Their data analysis and knowledge extraction.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  One of the things that's different about this telescope is when you used to build telescopes in astronomy and you know that from Simons Observatory as well. We used to think of telescope as, you know, give me a dish or a mirror, give me a detector. And then the rest, the grass students will figure out, we don't do that anymore. We can't do that anymore. The rest, the analysis software now is as important as the mirror and the camera or as the dish and the detector. And so about a third of all the effort on Rubin, more than a third of all the effort has gone into the software.

• 41:38Brian Keating?

  Any other things you want to say about technology, your team's roles and things, or even the role of AI? I mean, are we entering a realm where this might be the last of a kind of observatory? Not just because of budget cuts and things that we'll talk about over our next beer together, but are there perhaps, you know, does this represent a paradigm shift in how astronomers will do their craft in the 21st century?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  I think we're still trying to figure out exactly how far can AI get us. And my sense is that it can get us very far. All the software for Rubin, there are parts where we're using AI. But most of the software comes from ab initio understanding of the processes that generate these images. Rather than learning based on seeing correlations, which is what AI does. I think what's going to, one of the things that's going to happen with this data set is one, we're going to do a ton of great science. But the other, I think that we're, it will give us the training sets to, to do some really interesting experiments with the utilization of AI for future knowledge extraction and data analysis itself. Cause we're going to have six petabytes of data in about a year or so.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And so what I think is going to happen is next 10 years in astronomy or just in science in general are going to be challenging. Given budgetary situation throughout the world and everything. So we want to understand how to maximize the utility of data we're collecting. And I think the first couple of years, we're going to do phenomenally well with the software we have right now. But at the same time, we'll be devising. You know, how do we build maybe an AI-based code that goes even deeper? Like with all these numbers, and we know that historically, when SDSS started, nobody believed that you could do photometry to better than a few percent. Right? Now we're looking at 1% photometry and go like, yeah, that's easy.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Let's see if we can get to 0.5. Let's see if we can get to 0.1. And, and that I think is where AI is going to take us. Like all of these things that we don't even, aren't even imagining, building even deeper images, like in the solar system, discovering objects like, not like, just like planet nine, but objects could be even farther out than planet nine. Like that might require AI to become computationally usable.

• 43:48Brian Keating?

  Can you show that, Oz Tiana, the Trans-Newtonian and the visualization, the segment, before we start the wrap up?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  So this is an animation when we add a third dimension to all the asteroid discoveries. And so what you see, all these dots over there, each one is an individual asteroid. And now we zoom out away from the earth. The blue line that you see here is earth's orbit. The right thing that's coming in at the bottom is the sun. And that gives you a sense of scale and where these asteroids are in, and where these asteroids are in the solar system. So most of them are here in the main asteroid belt. Those are these blue ones. And if I rewind slightly, a little bit back to the front, like here are the near earth objects, know how close these are to the earth. And then these violet ones out here are the Trans-Newtonian objects. They're the distant ones.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And who knows, there might be a night planet somewhere out there. And if it's there, I think we have a pretty good chance to find it.

• 44:44Brian Keating?

  Wow. Well, speaking of asteroids, remember you can win one of your own if you go to ryankeen.com/edu. And you have a dot edu email address, live in the US. I'll send you a fragment of one of those babies out there. Hopefully not an earth crossing, crushing one. Although you might discover some of those, right, Mario?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. If there is one. So right now we know about 40% of what are called potentially hazardous asteroids. With Ruben, we hope to get that number up to about 80% or so. We hope to double the number of known potentially hazardous objects. And if you think about it in the other direction, in terms of risk, going from 60% unknown to 20% unknown is a reduction in risk of factor of three. So that's the hope.

• 45:24Brian Keating?

  Okay. Are there any other things you want to share?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Let me just show this video. And this is a view of the solar system from the top and then on the side. And what you're going to see is how Ruben discovers objects in its first year of operations. So it almost serves like a, it almost functions like a radar beam that goes through the solar system and as it observes, just uncovers everything. It sweeps everything out. So the red ones are near earth objects that you asked about. The yellow ones are main belt asteroids. Here are the Trojans that follow, they're in the same orbit as Jupiter. So Jupiter is hiding somewhere here. And this here is the outer solar system. And we're going to increase the number of objects known in the outer solar system by almost a factor of 10.

• 46:05Brian Keating?

  In just two years there, I mean, that's two years from today, you're showing.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. All of this happens in the next two to, roughly two to four years. It's wonderful. We don't have to wait for 10 years. That's the beauty of, I think, Solism Exploration with Ruben.

• 46:17Brian Keating?

  Are there potential military or defense applications of Ruben? Now, if the government, you know, decides they want to, you know, see what Iran is up to in space or something? Is that, has that been discussed? Is that something that, you know, you could talk about?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Telescopes of this scale, our government already has tools to look for things in orbit.

• 46:34Brian Keating?

  You did mention something, the LHC, a few minutes back. And I think, you know, what you have revealed today in the press conference was sort of like an LHC moment from, you know, 2013, when the Higgs boson discovery was announced. And I had my kids that were, at least the ones that were alive back then, I made them watch the, you know, the press conference so they could say they were there. And hopefully when the Simons Observatory gets a first light moment, they'll be doing the same thing. Let's zoom out because I think this is a, as I said, a paradigm shifting moment because Vera Rubin is not just about galaxies. It's not just about asteroids and so forth. It's not about the Lagoon Nebula only. It's about a new type of astronomy, multi-messenger astronomy.

• 47:17Brian Keating?

  It's an observatory that in conjunction with other collaborators, including Simons Observatory eventually, it can work with CMB data, supernova data, and very excitingly, LIGO and Virgo and the detections of, say, black holes, you know, 500 million light years away. When that's announced by LIGO, Ruben can automatically slew there to within 30 seconds to catch the afterglow. And as a professional astronomer, I'm really fascinated by all the stuff you've talked about today, but. As a curious citizen, as many of my audience members are, I'm really wondering, what does it mean when humanity can suddenly have realtime alerts about the most violent events in the universe? When you guys are characterizing and cataloging billions of objects, phenomena we've never

• 48:01Brian Keating?

  imagined, at high signal to noise, we're entering, you know, a new era where discoveries were going to happen daily instead of once per decade. And I'm worried, in some sense, if you can use that word, that humanity, like the second moon landing wasn't really watched by, you know, more than the square root of the first moon landing and so on. Like, will we become inured to this kind of spectacular realizations that occur, you know, on a daily basis? What kinds of civilization-changing discoveries might be hiding in the data that we don't even know about yet, Mario? What are you most excited about, the serendipitous things?

• 48:37Speaker 01

  That is the fate of man. You get used to the good stuff. With Gruben, it's going to be ju- just like that. We are now at the precipice with Gruben, with Simons, with all these other observatories that are now, they're on their own, they're fantastic. But the other thing that I think people don't quite realize is that we now can all operate together in almost like a network. When there's a, when a LIGO finds a, something that's interesting, we can get an alert within seconds after that happening and redirect the telescope there almost entirely automatically. We can collect a lot more data from very interesting, very unusual objects than we have before. The LIGO example is something that we're actually trying to test, I think, over the next month or so, just that entire system.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Where I think this leads us is with the sheer numbers that we're going to have, we're going to, we expect to observe an order of 40 billion objects, 20 billion galaxies, 20 billion stars, and then millions of asteroids. It means if you have a phenomenon in the universe that's occurring once in a million, we're going to have 40,000 of those. If you have something that happens once in a billion, right? We're going to have like a couple of dozen of those. So, so we're going to be able to look for incredibly rare things. And I think for the first couple of years, we're going to look for incredibly rare things that we, we expect, but then we're going to just be overwhelmed with things that we didn't even think about.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  And that's the sort of thing that's always happened. That's why these projects are interesting, right? You, every time you go and explore 10 times more of the universe that you've explored before, you're going to find things that excite, that, that surprise you. This is how we came back with dark energy. This is how we came back with dark matter. This is how exoplanets came about. Like many of these things that we just take for granted today, we're not supposed to be there. It's like, who ordered this? That type of thing. That with Ruben, we're going to be in the who ordered this scenario, hopefully in the next couple of years. And so everything we talked about today, you know, we're going to do this, do that. But that's probably not what Ruben is going to be famous for. It'll be something that's completely unknown. So that's been the history of astronomy.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  And that's why we really want to push forward and, and deeper and deeper with these kinds of telescopes.

• 50:49Brian Keating?

  And what a fitting tribute to Vera Rubin, her legacy, her name, and to the curiosity that she exemplified and that you do as well. And I just think how lucky the community is to have you and your colleagues, your students, to bring this light, data to light and really launch us on this new, you know, new epoch, this new era that I think we'll be remembering for all time. So Mario, thank you so much for everything you do. And congratulations, I'm so happy for you as a friend, proud of you. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, get nicer team. And I really, this is just the beginning and I cannot wait to see where this appetizer leads us to the main course over the next decade.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Thank you, Brian, and very much appreciate you saying that. And yeah, I want to stress that this is just the beginning. Like everyone here who's watching this, go take a look at this data set and start thinking what you can do with it.

• 51:39Brian Keating?

  We'll have links below and this is a citizen project. You paid for it out there, so take it, at least if you live in the US. But no, there's European partners too. Don't let Mario and folks like me have all the fun. Mario, thank you so much.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Thank you, Brian.

• 51:52Brian Keating?

  This has been a landmark year in astrophysics and Ruben is only making things more exciting. Click this video to hear past spokesperson of the DESI experiment, Kyle Dawson, explain exactly what DESI found and why it's upending our understanding of dark energy. Click here and don't forget to subscribe.

• 52:11Speaker 02

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