Description:

Astrophysics is the perfect nursery for Data Science: we cannot touch the stars, we cannot explode them in a lab. We know them only through our data collection efforts, messy, complex data. The Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is about to usher yet a new era in data-intensive astrophysics. The "next-generation" ground-based astronomical survey, LSST will generate 20TB of information-rich optical-imaging data every night for 10 years starting in 2024. The survey is designed to study nearly all subdomains of astrophysics, from the closest Solar System objects to the farthest cosmological explosions, and with a unique data policy that gives unrestricted access to all US and Chilean scientists, it is staged to be truly transformational. I will talk about the status and prosepcts of Rubin and its revolutionary LSST, how we are optimizing the survey with a community focused approach, and how my group is preparing to discover unusual and even completely new phenomena, incluidng light echoes, the reflections of transients on interstellar dust, and the shortest lived galactic and extragalactic transients .

Speaker: Federica Bianco, Assistant Professor, University of Delaware

Host: Professor Giacomo Fragione