Szabó Róbert (Csillagászati és Földtudományi Kutatóközpont)

Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and time: nothing can hide In the sky

Abstract: The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is one of the most ambitious ground-based astronomical programs of this decade. The revolutionary 8.2-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope, equipped with a 3.2-gigapixel camera—the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy—will conduct an unprecedented ten-year survey of the southern sky. Following a long preparatory phase, operations are about to begin. LSST will image the entire sky visible from Chile every three nights, detecting everything that moves or changes. Over a decade, it will effectively create a deep, multi-color time-lapse movie of the Universe. With this unique dataset, researchers will probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy; discover interstellar comets and potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids; study supernovae and other astrophysical transients; and map the structure and evolution of the Milky Way. The observatory will issue public alerts within 60 seconds of each observation, generating millions of alerts every night and ultimately producing hundreds of petabytes of data. What scientific and technological challenges arise from processing this enormous data volume and managing the nightly alert stream? What role do Hungarian researchers play in this global endeavor? And how will LSST reshape astronomy and astrophysics in the coming decades? After introducing the project, the talk will address these questions.

About the lecturer: Róbert Szabó (b. 1975) is an astronomer and has served as Director of the Konkoly Observatory at the HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences since 2019. He earned his degree in astronomy from Eötvös Loránd University and obtained his PhD in 2004. Following his doctorate, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida (USA), where he worked on hydrodynamical numerical modelling of stellar pulsations. He returned to Hungary in 2007 and founded the Hungarian Kepler Group, focusing on the scientific exploitation of space-based photometric data. His research encompasses both the observational and theoretical modelling of pulsating stars, as well as exoplanets and large-scale sky surveys. He initiated the international conference series on RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids, which has since become a well-established forum in the field. Dr. Szabó serves as the Hungarian Co-Principal Investigator of the European Space Agency’s forthcoming medium-class mission, Ariel, a space telescope equipped with an infrared spectrograph designed to investigate the atmospheres of more than one thousand exoplanets. He also leads the Hungarian in-kind contribution to the LSST Consortium. He has been awarded the prestigious Lendület (Momentum) grant twice — a unique distinction. His first project focused on near-field cosmology and preparation for LSST, significantly increasing the number of Hungarian data rights holders. His second Lendület project concentrates on multidimensional numerical modelling of variable stars.