The biggest buzz in ground-based astronomy these days is the soon to be completed Rubin Observatory and its forthcoming wide field Large Synoptic Sky Survey. From a lonely mountaintop in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, the observatory’s 8.4-meter optical telescope will scan the southern sky roughly every three to four nights.

In the process, over a decade of its observations will generate an unprecedented amount of raw data, much of it related to so-called transient astronomical events. Such events are usually active over brief periods of days or weeks and can involve high-energetic and destructive astrophysical events such as supernovae or gamma ray bursts. In fact, the LSST survey is expected to generate so much data that it will require a level of scientific data management that uses software and technology that will border on artificial intelligence.

The telescope’s repeated scans of its 9.6 square degree field of view (about the size of 40 full moons) will use a 3.2 gigapixel camera to create a nightly plethora of some 10 million astronomical alerts. In astronomical parlance, an alert can be triggered when a celestial object changes its brightness and/or position on the sky over short time scales.

But within 60 seconds of hitting the telescope’s primary mirror, these event’s photons will be transferred via high-speed optical relay into massive amounts of cloud storage. From there, this raw data will be processed and sent out to astronomers worldwide by so-called alert brokers.

An alert broker is an intermediary between the survey telescope, your observational science data, and follow-up telescopes, Francisco Forster, an astrophysicist at the University of Chile, told me in his office in Santiago. Because of the number of alerts expected with the LSST, you need to have special groups that have the capacity to ingest the alert stream and then do something with it, he says.