Rubin’s LSST: Synergies with Gamma-Ray Astronomy

Speaker

Dr. željko Ivezić, the Director of the Rubin Observatory

Abstract

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will provide transformative opportunities for gamma-ray astronomy through deep, wide, and high-cadence optical observations. LSST, the most comprehensive optical astronomical sky survey ever undertaken, will obtain panoramic images of the night sky every clear night for ten years, beginning this year. The resulting tens of petabytes of imaging data, essentially a digital color movie of the night sky, will include about 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and will be used for investigations ranging from cataloging potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids to fundamental physics, including the characterization of dark matter and dark energy.

LSST data will enable the identification and characterization of counterparts to gamma-ray bursts, blazars, neutrino sources, and other high-energy transients, while providing crucial variability and host-galaxy information. LSST will also improve searches for dark matter through the discovery of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies and will help classify large populations of previously unidentified gamma-ray sources. Synergies with facilities such as Fermi, CTA, Swift, and IceCube will enhance multi-wavelength and multi-messenger studies of relativistic jets, cosmic particle acceleration, and transient phenomena, bringing us closer to massive multi-wavelength transient astrophysics, one of the central paradigms of 2030s astronomy.

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