Nov 17, 2020, MSI
On November 17, 2020, MSI had the honour of (virtually) hosting a public talk by Steven M. Kahn, Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences, Stanford University, and Director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Prof. Kahn described the design and development of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new and unique major astronomical facility under development in Chile with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy. The Rubin Observatory is a large-aperture, wide-field ground-based telescope designed to perform a ten-year, time-domain survey of the entire southern hemisphere of sky in six optical colour bands. He walked us through how the observatory will photograph every part of the southern sky nearly 1,000 times over its planned decade of operations. He expects that it will discover nearly 20 billion new galaxies, and a comparable number of stars – the first time in human history when we will know of more objects in the Universe than there are people on Earth. A diverse array of distinct science investigations will be enabled by the resulting database, ranging from studies of small moving bodies in the solar system to the structure and evolution of the Universe as a whole. The talk was followed by a Q&A where we took questions from our very enthusiastic audience, so many that we ran out of time!
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