The first Rubin real-time alert has arrived, the event was led by Prof. Bellm joined by his team at the University of Washington. 

Brianna Smart, Eric Bellm, Ian Sullivan

This milestone marks the beginning of a new era in time-domain astronomy, with rapid alerts enabling discoveries across the dynamic sky. Learn more about this exciting achievement and what it means for Rubin science in the full press release here.

Excerpt from the UW News Press Release

On Feb. 24, astronomers’ computers around the world lit up with a deluge of cosmic notifications — 800,000 alerts about new asteroids in our solar system, exploding stars across the galaxy and other noteworthy changes in the night sky. The discoveries were made by the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile and distributed globally within about two minutes.

That flurry of notifications marked the commencement of the observatory’s Alert Production Pipeline, a sophisticated software system developed at the University of Washington that is eventually expected to produce up to seven million alerts per night.

“Rubin’s alert system was designed to allow anyone to identify interesting astronomical events with enough notice to rapidly obtain time-critical follow-up observations,” said Eric Bellm, a research associate professor of astronomy at the UW who leads the Alert Production Pipeline Group for the Rubin Observatory. “Rubin will survey the sky at an unprecedented scale and allow us to find the most rare and unusual objects in the universe. We can’t wait to see the exciting science that comes from these data.”