Rubin Observatory Has Started Paging Astronomers 800,000 Times a Night (scientificamerican.com) 21
On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and "other transient celestial events," reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning -- that number is projected to climb into the millions as it continues scanning the ever-changing sky. From the report: The astronomical observatory equipped with world's largest camera hit a key milestone on February 24, when a complex data-processing system pushed hundreds of thousands of alerts out to scientists eager to pore over its most exciting sightings. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory began operations last year, capturing stunning, panoramic time-lapse views of the cosmos with ease. Rubin's first images, based on just 10 hours of observations, let space fans zoom seemingly forever into an overwhelmingly starry sky. But watchful astronomers were always awaiting the next step: the system that would automatically alert them to the most promising activity in the overhead sky amid the 1,000 or so enormous images that Rubin's telescope captures every night.
"We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears," said Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management, to Scientific American last summer. "It's way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves." So even as they were designing and building the Rubin Observatory itself, scientists were also designing an alert system to help astronomers navigate the flood of data. As soon as the telescope began observations, the team started constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail.
Now the data processing systems that support the observatory are starting to automatically compare every new Rubin image to the corresponding section of that background template. The systems identify all of the differences, each of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between a potential supernova and a possible newfound asteroid, for example. Alerting the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers -- as well as members of the public -- can sign up for notifications based on the type of sighting they're interested in and the brightness of the observation in question. And now that the alerts system has gone live, users receive a tiny, fuzzy image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits their criteria -- all just a couple of minutes after Rubin captures the original image.
"We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears," said Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management, to Scientific American last summer. "It's way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves." So even as they were designing and building the Rubin Observatory itself, scientists were also designing an alert system to help astronomers navigate the flood of data. As soon as the telescope began observations, the team started constructing a static reference image of the entire sky in impeccable detail.
Now the data processing systems that support the observatory are starting to automatically compare every new Rubin image to the corresponding section of that background template. The systems identify all of the differences, each of which is individually flagged. The algorithms can also distinguish between a potential supernova and a possible newfound asteroid, for example. Alerting the scientific community is the final, crucial step. Astronomers -- as well as members of the public -- can sign up for notifications based on the type of sighting they're interested in and the brightness of the observation in question. And now that the alerts system has gone live, users receive a tiny, fuzzy image with some astronomical metadata of each observation that fits their criteria -- all just a couple of minutes after Rubin captures the original image.
news (Score:4, Funny)
Wait a moment! (Score:2)
People still use pagers?
Re: (Score:3)
yes. more or less
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Emergency communication operators still deploy such services, for example for volunteer firemen who can be called anywhere anytime.
* Belgian company ASTRID operates the emergency communications and among other things has a pager service https://www.astrid.be/en/servi... [astrid.be]
* French company e*message operates an independent network of 435 antennas transmitting on 466 MHz, totalling 130,000 users of POCSAG pagers for emergency responders. https://www.emessage.fr/equipe... [emessage.fr]
Equipment for firemen / industrial safety
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I recommended one to a family member recently to go with a flip phone.
There's just no way on most smartphones to have only extremely specific notifications wake you up or alert you to only emergencies.
One could imagine various ad-hoc methods to do this ("mom, text me with EMERGENCY if it is one, otherwise I'll read messages tonight") but the smartphones don't allow such deep integrations.
It's a lot more effort to dial a pager and leave a callback number. Back in the day we'd do 10-digit and 999 at the end
Astronomical Alert (Score:2, Offtopic)
Meteors spotted over Tehran and Tel Aviv
Re: (Score:2)
This is a government of, by, and for tech bros. You expect them to keep their knowledgebase updated?
Re: Astronomical Alert (Score:2, Insightful)
dunno about meteors, but war crimes are reported aplenty.
Basically a denial-of-service attack (Score:2)
Meaning the ones "paged" will stop listening completely. Sounds like a resounding failure.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Basically a denial-of-service attack (Score:4, Interesting)
That is incorrect. 800,000 alerts did go out to each rrecipient. And it'll be in the millions soon. But the headline is clicking, they're not using pagers. There are alert brokers set up which receive alerts directly from Vera-Rubin, and astronomers, and the general public, subscribe to those. The alerts are generally filtered through scripts to identify light curves particular astronomers are interested in. They'll even have the telescopes automatically change their imaging schedule based on them. So there aren't "pagers" involved on any first or even second level alerts. Certainly not 800k alerts going to one pager, or even one alert going to 800k pagers.
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Obviously, it is not pagers. That would be excessively expensive (sending messages to pagers costs money) and not work on top of that.
I wonder how many had actual filters in place though.
I want an alert each time a source gets dimmer (Score:1)
than the reference image at the 5 sigma confidence level.
That guy I never liked...I have it on good authority he's an astronomy nerd and wants to be alerted whenever a source dims at the 1-sigma confidence level!
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All right Dudley Bose:
https://rubinobservatory.org/f... [rubinobservatory.org]
Never mind (Score:2)
It was just another Starlink.
If I were receiving that many notifications, (Score:2)
I'd just smash my device, or I might legitimately go insane.