Vera C Rubin Observatory: the Universe in Action - Coming Soon, by Dr Amanda Bauer - 2021-03-08
Channel: Cork Astronomy Club
Date: 2021-03-12

Dr Amanda Bauer is an American astronomer and science communicator based in Tucson, Arizona. She is Head of Education and Public Outreach (EPO), and Interim Deputy Director Rubin Operations, at the Vera C Rubin Observatory. Her principal field of research concerns how galaxies form, how they create new stars, and why they stop creating new stars. To explore how galaxies build into the diverse structures we see today, she analyzes systematic surveys of hundreds of thousands of galaxies for evidence of the physical processes that regulate the rates at which new stars form in galaxies which are subjected to different conditions. Her research has found that a galaxy's position within a galactic cluster affects stellar evolution within that galaxy: the closer it is to the center of a cluster, the sooner it stops forming new stars. It seems that near the centre of a galactic cluster, the large number of close galactic neighbours influence each other gravitationally to produce a sea of hot gas, which seems to constrains new star formation. Mergers of galaxies also play a part: Dr Bauer's forecasts of how our own Milky Way galaxy will merge with the Andromeda Galaxy and the two smaller Magellanic Cloud galaxies several billion years from now have prompted new studies of how the rates of star formation will be affected. (Wikipedia; lsst.org)

The Rubin Observatory is under construction in north-central Chile, in the Andes Mountains at an elevation of over 2,600 metres. It will house the Simonyi Survey Telescope, originally proposed in 2001 as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Construction of its unique 8.4 metre diameter mirror commenced in 2004, with the observatory building started in 2015. First light for the telescope is anticipated in 2022, with its survey scheduled to commence in 2023. Called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, it retains the LSST acronym while the observatory was named after Vera Rubin. The survey will last for ten years, repeatedly mapping the night sky every few nights to catalogue tens of billions of objects, and detect changes in brightness and/or position of many of them, providing an unprecedented view of the Universe and its dynamic nature. (Wikipedia; NOIRLab)

Vera C Rubin (1928-2016) was an American astronomer who conducted ground-breaking research on galaxies. Her Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1954 at Georgetown University, concluded that galaxies clump together, rather than being distributed randomly through the universe - a ground breaking though controversial idea not pursued by other astronomers for two decades. Rubin pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates in the 1970s and '80s. She uncovered a discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion by studying galactic rotation curves. The discrepancy became known as the galaxy rotation problem, and evidenced the existence of galactic halos of dark matter. Initially met with skepticism, Rubin's results were confirmed in subsequent decades, including by imaging gravitational lenses. Her legacy was described by The New York Times as "ushering in a Copernican-scale change" in cosmological theory. (Wikipedia)

Rubin Observatory promotional video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6QYjNjivDE&ab_channel=RubinObservatory

This "Lockdown Lecture" to Cork Astronomy Club was given on 8 Mar 2021 via Zoom.

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