Birmingham astronomers have front-row seat for ground-breaking movie of the cosmos

The first images from the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (Rubin) have been revealed to the world in a 'First Look' event, heralding a new era in astronomy.

Considered the most ambitious sky survey to date, Rubin's 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is creating an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe, which will help revolutionise how we explore the cosmos.

Enabled by an investment of £23 million from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), UK astronomers and software developers, have been preparing the hardware and software needed to analyse the petabytes of data that the survey will produce to enable ground-breaking science that will enhance our understanding of the Universe. Science operations are expected to start towards the end of 2025.

Professor Graham Smith, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham and LSST:UK Project Scientist, said: "The University of Birmingham has been at the forefront of the UK's role in Rubin/LSST since day one, just over a decade ago. I am really thrilled that Birmingham postdocs and students now have the opportunity to use the amazing data emerging from Rubin.

This will touch every area of our community — from cosmology to galaxies, to multi-messenger astronomy, to stars and planets, and more — so this is an exciting moment to bring us all together and share with the public."

In addition to the survey, Rubin also plans to observe a few special "targets of opportunity", new and very high-impact discoveries from other facilities, including Rubin follow-up observations of gravitational wave sources from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) instruments, some of which are expected to be gravitationally lensed – key areas of strength for Birmingham and UK astronomy.

As recently published by an international team led by scientists at the University of Birmingham, this combination of Rubin and LVK will be central to achieving the first multi-messenger gravitational lensing, a discovery which will lead to scientific breakthroughs in fundamental physics, cosmology, and astrophysics.

Dr Suhail Dhawan, Assistant Professor and 125^th Anniversary Fellow , University of Birmingham and co-lead for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Dark Energy Science Collaboration Time Domain Working Group, said: "The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will revolutionise our discovery potential for new sources in the night sky, our understanding of exploding stars and their use in measuring the current rate of expansion. It is expected to find rare events where stellar explosions are magnified, changing the landscape of new discoveries and solving the mysteries about the composition and expansion history of our Universe."

Dimple, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham said: “Rubin will revolutionise our ability to discover kilonovae — fleeting cosmic events that forge the Universe’s heaviest elements — enabling transformative insights into the origin of gold, platinum, and the astrophysical sites of r-process nucleosynthesis, thereby helping us uncover where and how the Universe forges its heaviest building blocks.”