By Stephanie Dwilson | 2026-03-24

The US-funded Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located atop a mountain in Chile, has launched a real-time alert system that will allow scientists around the world to coordinate on a scale never seen before.

The Rubin Observatory’s first set of alerts documenting astronomical events — a whopping 800,000 of them — were sent out on the night of February 24. This number will eventually increase to as many as seven million alerts a night.

The alerts cover all kinds of astronomical events, from exploding stars to new asteroids that could pose potential threats.

By getting them in near real time, scientists will be able to increase their chances of studying rare interstellar moments in detail.

The alert system’s software was designed over the course of a decade by a team of researchers and software developers from the University of Washington (UW) astronomy department.

The team’s goal was to develop a streamlined method of processing the telescope’s 10 terabytes of data every night.

"Enabling real-time discovery on such a massive data stream has required years of technical innovation in image processing algorithms, databases and data orchestration," said UW research associate professor of astronomy Eric Bellm.

Bellm leads the Alert Production Pipeline Group, which is the team responsible for developing and operating the software system that monitors the night sky.

Later this year, the Rubin Observatory will begin a Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) that will scan the Southern Hemisphere sky every night for 10 years, creating a time-lapse record of the universe.

The alerts will chronicle the discoveries made during these scans.

More than two decades in the making, the giant telescope is perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos.

The observatory's mission is focused on understanding dark matter and dark energy, mapping the distribution of mass and measuring its expansion; and identifying and cataloguing millions of new objects in the solar system.

It is focused on charting the structure of the Milky Way and its stars, and tracking objects that change in brightness or position.

The alerts will signal when something in the night sky has changed since the observatory last scanned that region of space. Receiving near real-time alerts will enable scientists to obtain critical follow-up data more quickly.

'Untold astrophysical treasures'

"Rubin Observatory’s groundbreaking capabilities are revealing untold astrophysical treasures and expanding scientists’ access to the ever-changing cosmos," said Kathy Turner of the US Department of Energy Office of Science.

The observatory is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. It is operated jointly by the NSF NOIRLab and the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the DOE. NOIRLab is the NSF’s center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy. It operates multiple observatories and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

The observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope is equipped with the largest digital camera ever built, called the LSST Camera. This camera has a 3.2-gigapixel resolution and can generate 20 terabytes of data every night.

The telescope captures a new image every 40 seconds.

The data is then processed at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where images are compared to a template of previous images of the same region.

A network of software platforms interpret the data, using machine learning algorithms to sort and classify the alerts before they’re distributed.

The alerts are public and accessible to anyone. A general alert is typically issued within two minutes of detecting a variation.

By connecting scientists to a "vast and continuous" stream of information, the observatory "will make it possible to follow the universe’s events as they unfold, from the explosive to the most faint and fleeting," said Luca Rizzi of the NSF.