Rubin's cosmic survey begins. Pitt researchers have been ready for decades
image: From left, Professor Michael Wood-Vasey and Christopher Hernandez, a fifth-year graduate student in Wood-Vasey's lab, worked with Google to develop an alert system that will make data from the LSST available worldwide.
Credit: Aimee Obidzinski/University of Pittsburgh
The first night the Vera C. Rubin Observatory tested its notification system, researchers received more than 800,000 alerts from its alert broker system, a series of hubs—including one developed jointly by Pitt and Google—engineered to share data with researchers and the public. Each alert signified a change in the night sky—from thousands of newly discovered asteroids, to light that made its way from stellar explosions that occurred eons ago.
And that wasn't even the main event.
University of Pittsburgh researchers Jeff Newman and Michael Wood-Vasey, both astronomy and physics professors, have been working toward this day for decades: Monday, June 29, 2026, the official start of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Rubin Observatory. Over the next decade, Rubin will image the entire southern sky every few nights, creating an ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the Universe.
Availabe via email: Professor Jeff Newman
Availabe via email: Professor Micahel Wood-Vasey
“I’ve been working on preparations for the Rubin Observatory for more than 20 years — starting before I came to Pitt,” said Newman “It’s tremendously exciting to have the concepts we were talking about then become a reality today.”'
More recently, he's been working with Brett Andrews and Mi Dai developing tools to more accurately measure galaxy distances, turn Rubin’s images into 3D maps, and to improve the ability to detect changes between observations.
Wood-Vasey is searching for a special kind of supernova, Type Ia, that may help answer questions about dark matter. He also worked with Google and Christopher Hernandez, a graduate student, to develop a system to share data with anyone who is interested and has access to a computer, via the Pitt-Google Broker.
Rubin will ultimately create a 10-year time-lapse view of the southern sky after taking 2 million images, which will yield 30 trillion measurements of the properties of billions of galaxies, stars and asteroids
"It's amazing and emotional to see the Rubin Observatory LSST begin. This survey is for everyone, but also, it has been the focus of two decades of my career," Wood-Vasey said. His graduate school research relied on fewer than 200 observations of Type Ia supernovae. Today, a student could take advantage of about 5,000 such observations. In a few years, LSST will have observed 10s of thousands.
"Still, while my research group is specifically looking forward to finding and studying hundreds of thousands of supernovae to explore the Universe, we are even more excited about being a part of sharing the changing Universe with everyone in real time."