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By taking a small step to join the in spring 2024, Illinois Institute of Technology’s burgeoning astronomy program has taken a giant leap forward.

Leading the charge is Assistant Professor of Physics Emily Leiner, who sees joining the alliance as a gamechanger that will help provide new research opportunities to students and faculty alike.

“The LSST Discovery Alliance is a network of universities and other institutions that have come together and formed a nonprofit organization that directs a lot of scientific programming for the LSST survey,” says Leiner. “It really opens up options for our students to be involved in a wider network of astronomers and astrophysicists who are affiliated with the [Vera C.] Rubin Observatory and LSST.”

The LSST survey—which will study dark energy and dark matter, map objects within our solar system, and detect transient events such as supernovae—will be conducted by the 8.4-meter that is currently under construction in Chile. With first light scheduled for summer 2025, the telescope will photograph the entire sky every few nights, generating a massive amount of data for members in the alliance to analyze.

“The Rubin Observatory is going to generate terabytes and terabytes of data every single night that needs to be analyzed,” says Leiner. “One of the really important things is having tools in place for people to actually use that data and training people how to use these tools. That’s one of LSST’s big missions: what tools do we need? How can we do trainings where we actually plug researchers in to people who have developed these tools?”

Studying transient events, one of the LSST survey’s goals, is a large part of Leiner’s research. In particular, Leiner is interested in the interactions within binary star systems, which in some cases lead to the two stars merging together in an explosive event.

While extremely bright supernovae are the most well-known type of transient event, there are many explosions taking place across the universe that aren’t as bright, but still provide significant insight into stellar evolution.

“Some of these mergers are hard to see because they are fainter, so we can’t see tons of extragalactic sources,” says Leiner. “We’re going to detect a lot of these fainter transients that we haven’t detected very many of. We haven’t imaged very many of those kinds of events. It’s really going to be very exciting because it’s going to show us the lower luminosity end of these explosive transients that we really don’t know much about.”

One big question still needs to be answered: how will all that data be processed?

Artificial intelligence will play a significant role. In September Illinois Tech was announced as a satellite partner in the that aims to create innovative AI tools for astronomy research. The SkAI Institute has received a $20 million National Science Foundation grant that is meant to accelerate astronomy’s data-driven revolution.

“At the institute, they’re developing AI lesson plans, projects we can implement into our courses—such as our astronomy courses, for example—or we can have guest lecturers come in and talk about methodology in AI and machine learning that’s used in astronomy,” says Leiner. “It’ll create a lot of research opportunities in the �鶹APP area.”

Having only started its astrophysics program in 2016, Illinois Tech’s membership in both the LSST Discovery Alliance and the SkAI Institute marks a new phase for the young program as the study of the universe continues to evolve.

“It’s really exciting for us as an institute that we’re entering some of these really big collaborations in the astronomy world,” says Leiner. “We are this nascent program that’s just sprung up—two faculty. I think it’s really amazing that we’re able to get our students involved in the wider astronomical community.”