Optical engineering

RSAA Colloquium: Anais Moeller (Swinburne U.)

A new era for time-domain astronomy with Rubin and Fink.

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13 May 2025 11:00am
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Speakers

Dr Anais Moeller from Swinburne University of Technology.
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A new era for time-domain astronomy with Rubin and Fink.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will open a new era for optical astronomy by imaging the Southern Sky at unprecedented depths. Every night for ten years, it will detect millions of transients and variables. LSST is a great opportunity to shed light on transient astrophysics and constrain Dark Energy using supernovae. However, to fully harness the power of Rubin LSST, we require methods capable of dealing with its large data volumes to maximise science and optimise our follow-up resources. In this talk I will present Fink, an official LSST broker developed to face these challenges. Fink will receive all of Rubin's time-domain detections in real-time. Fink will select the most promising ones for a variety of science cases including supernovae, kilonovae, TDEs, asteroids and others. I will present our classification methods, as well as first results with both LSST simulations and precursor data. I will focus on supernovae identification to enable cosmology and probe fainter populations in more diverse environments. I will conclude by discussing how Rubin will enable us to study the diversity of transients and to find out whether Dark Energy is a constant or evolving with time.

Location

Duffield Lecture Theatre or Zoom