Stony Brook University
7:30 PM Friday, December 04, 2020
on-line via Zoom
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
Prof. Anja von der Linden
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is currently under construction on Cerro Pachon in Chile. Its 8.4m telescope will feature the largest digital camera ever built, consisting of 189 4k x 4k CCDs, for a total of 3.2 Gigapixels. With its large field of view, Rubin can map the entire night sky once every 3 nights. Its goal is to conduct 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 of 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.
Anja von der Linden is an observational cosmologist in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Stony Brook. 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.
