Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
ESS Building, Room 001
Friday, Feb 06, 2026
Ready, Set, Go: The start of Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
Prof. Anja von der Linden
On June 23rd, 2025, the newly built Vera C. Rubin Observatory captivated audiences world-wide by revealing its First Look images. Since then, Rubin has completed its construction phase, and is now gearing up to commence the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a 10-year survey of the southern sky. As a 10-year ‘movie’ of the sky, LSST will revolutionize the search for transient events at optical wavelengths, leading to the discovery of countless asteroids, supernovae, active galactic nuclei and more. At the same time, it will build up the largest deep image of the sky, allowing precision mapping of the matter distribution in the Universe. With this design, LSST will address four key science areas: understanding Dark Matter and Dark Energy; mapping small objects in the Solar System, including Near-Earth Asteroids; studying the transient optical sky; and mapping the structure of the Milky Way galaxy.
Prof. Anja von der Linden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook. As an observational cosmologist, her main research focus are clusters of galaxies, their gravitational lensing signal, and their use as probes of cosmology. She received her PhD in Astrophysics from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, Germany, and was a Tycho Brahe fellow at Stanford University, California, and the Dark Cosmology Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark, before joining the Stony Brook faculty in 2015.
