Largest images of outer space delivered daily from Chile observatory to California supercomputer – by FIU

Pulsating stars. Supernova explosions. Streaking asteroids. Far-off galaxies.

Humankind recently saw the first stunning images of outer space taken by the world’s largest digital camera – and Florida International University helped make the pictures a reality.

The camera sits inside the new telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile built to map the entire sky visible from the Southern hemisphere.

Each exposure of the camera lasts 30 seconds before the telescope rotates a few degrees and the sequence begins again. Between sundown and sunup, more than 800 images – the widest ever recorded – are captured as part of a project to create a detailed time-lapse survey of the heavens.

The nightly photoshoot will continue for the next ten years, bringing to scientists and amateur stargazers around the world something never before seen by Earthlings.

“Amazing,” says FIU astronomer James R. Webb of the moment he and students witnessed the first images made available.

“You're looking at stars in our galaxy,” he says of the closest objects. “Then you're looking at distant galaxies,” he points out on a screen at the university’s astro science center. “And the colors basically give you an indication of how far away they are,”  he explains of the swirls and dots of various hues that together depict a magnificent, floating expanse of gases and rock.

A cosmic leap of faith

Getting to the big reveal required figuring out how to transfer billions and billions of pixels generated on a mountaintop in central Chile to a supercomputer in California in near real time.

That planning began more than 20 years ago when the idea for Vera Rubin first took shape even as the technology to develop and operate the world’s widest-angle survey camera did not yet exist.

Also not viable back then: a data network that could transport the anticipated images and attached metadata thousands of miles to a processing facility.

“But they predicted that by the time the telescope was ready for operation, the network technology and the computation technology was going to be available,” says Julio Ibarra. He is the principal investigator in charge of the university’s AmLight network, run by the Division of IT, and also serves as the vice president for technology augmented research and a research professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computing.

Ibarra is referencing the “gamble” taken by folks who saw the future. They subscribed to the then-widely accepted “law” that computing and technology accelerates quickly enough that whatever is not possible here and now will be so in a given number of years.

“They just looked forward,” says Ibarra, who has worked on the Vera Rubin project from day one. “They used a lens of reasoning that in 20 years the technology will be where we need it to be to do what we want.”

Turns out, the tech did catch up, and FIU has delivered.

A solid history

Even while the physical aspects of the Vera Rubin Observatory were years away from construction, FIU already had in place most of the architecture needed for the 16,000-mile fiber optic network that today fuels high-level astronomical inquiry.

In the early 2000s, the university operated a pioneering research and education network that served several cities in Latin America and offered a way to share data between institutions there and in the United States in fields such as high-energy physics and astronomy. That infrastructure soon caught the attention of the National Science Foundation (NSF) as it sought to transmit data directly from its Gemini Observatory in Chile.

Until that time, large U.S. telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, which provide optimal environmental conditions for astronomical observation, were “just shipping disks and tape,” Ibarra explains of how data was relayed. “But Gemini was that paradigm shift,” he says of what would become the first near-immediate transfer of data from an observatory to partnering organizations. “They needed a network to be able to do their observations in a coordinated manner.”

FIU met Gemini’s challenge and has not looked back. Now, through two decades of continual innovation, the AmLight network has evolved to support the high-speed transmission of the enormous amounts of data generated by the NSF-Department of Energy’s Vera Rubin Observatory for a worldwide audience.

Critical to success is the network’s large bandwidth, or data transfer rate – 100 gigabits per second – that allows incoming data to travel the entire length of the network within a critical seven seconds to ensure a seamless, accurate depiction of the night sky. It also means that some 20 terabytes of data can easily make the trip every single day.

“The culture of the NSF is to push the boundaries, and that requires taking risks with technology,” Ibarra says of what his team does out of sight but remains essential to the observatory’s fulling its ultimate purpose.

Those efforts included an insistence on greater programmability and automation of the network, something software companies initially balked at but that, ultimately, expanded capacity in time to meet the deadline.

Secrets of the universe

The first images released publicly have generated a wave of excitement. Beyond their sheer splendor, they hold immeasurable value for science.

The descriptive information stored alongside the actual image data – about the brightness, position, color, shape and variability of celestial objects – is delivered to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and immediately processed and analyzed. There, alerts are quickly generated that call out changes, movements and bodies of interest – such as the thousands of previously unknown asteroids that the camera has recorded – and released with coordinates so that observers can adjust their own telescopes for a view.

FIU astronomer Webb focuses his research on the luminous cores of distant galaxies, known as quasars. The collected data – which he will request by submitting a scientific proposal – will inform his work, which relates to a main objective of the project.

“One of the primary goals is to look for dark energy,” a mysterious force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. “We think these things are linked together in some way, but we don't know how,” he says. “By taking huge swaths of sky and plotting the position of the different galaxies, we can try to start making connections.”

The ever-bigger, broader and deeper look into the world beyond our own can begin to offer answers to questions humankind has asked for millennia, Webb believes. Cutting-edge tools such as the Vera Rubin can help in the search to comprehend our own existence, and he encourages everyone to look up.

“Before we really understand why we're here and how we're here,” he says, “we need to understand all the details of the universe.”