Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium: Tony Tyson - "The Legacy Survey of Space and Time"
Department of Physics
370 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
201

Fueled by advances in microelectronics, software, and large optics fabrication, a new type of sky survey will begin in 2025. With 1000 deep images per night, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will cover the entire southern sky to 24th magnitude every 3 nights for ten years in 6 wavelength bands – creating a digital color motion picture of our Universe. LSST opens a new discovery space: faint transients. Alerts will be issued within 60 seconds of detection. The deep images from LSST will chart billions of remote galaxies, providing multiple interlocking probes of the mysterious Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Scientists worldwide will access these data, leading to unexpected discoveries. I will briefly review the project history, the 3200 megapixel camera, and laboratory testing of the CCD detectors. I will then focus on the interference to astronomy from low Earth orbiting communications satellites.
Tony Tyson is Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of California, Davis. Before that, he worked 35 years at Bell Labs in the physics division. While applying CCDs to astronomy in the early 1980’s he discovered a population of faint blue galaxies, and then pioneered the field of weak gravitational lensing using these distant galaxies as sources. His current research is in cosmology: dark matter distribution, gravitational lens effects, cosmic shear, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. He has led an international effort to build a new kind of telescope/camera called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, recently renamed the Vera Rubin Observatory. First light is 2025. He was director 2003-2013 and is now Chief Scientist. Tyson received his B.S. in Physics from Stanford in l962 and Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from University of Wisconsin in 1967. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.