Scientific evenings

Lecture will take place on Friday, 12 May 2023, at 6 p.m. at the the Lanthieri mansion in Vipava.

Lecture will be in English.

The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the first project to be undertaken at the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, will be the most comprehensive optical astronomical sky survey ever undertaken. Starting in a couple of years, the Rubin Observatory will obtain panoramic images covering the sky visible from its location in Chile every clear night for ten years. Close to a thousand observations of each position across half of the celestial sphere will represent the greatest movie of all time: it would take 11 months of uninterrupted viewing to see it! About 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars will be detected using this 100 petabyte image dataset — for the first time in history, the number of cataloged celestial objects will exceed the number of living people! LSST data will be used for investigations ranging from cataloging potentially hazardous near- Earth asteroids to fundamental physics such as the characterization of dark matter and dark energy. The scientific goals behind this project will be described, lots of pretty pictures to illustrate the progress of its construction will be shown, and then, to finish, a brief discussion of data analysis challenges that need to be tackled to make the best use of the massive and complex LSST dataset.