More than 100 astronomy enthusiasts gathered in Columbia’s Havemeyer Hall to celebrate the release of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a groundbreaking new telescope in Chile poised to transform our understanding of the universe. The event, co-hosted by Columbia, CUNY, Rutgers, and Schmidt Sciences, featured faculty talks, a livestream from Washington, D.C., and lighthearted touches like alien headbands identifying professional astronomers. Funded by the NSF and DOE, the Rubin Observatory will soon begin the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), collecting unprecedented data on billions of cosmic phenomena. Columbia scientists—some of whom helped launch the observatory—shared ambitious plans to use LSST data to study everything from hidden binary stars and stellar eruptions to black holes, gravitational waves, and galaxies' farthest-flung stars.
Read more in the Columbia News article posted here.
