Frontiers Lecture: Observing Wide, Deep and Across Time

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

7 pm

An artist's depiction of a black hole: an orange disc, with bright purple jets shooting through it, against an inky black expanse.
NASA/ESA/STScI
Ground-based optical astronomy is on the verge of a data revolution.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon come online to start its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). This survey of the southern and equatorial sky will collect 20 terabytes of imaging data every 24 hours for the next ten years, creating an unprecedented map of the sky covering a large area to great distances and across time.   

In this Frontiers Lecture, we will hear from Dara Norman, Ph.D., deputy director of the Community Science and Data Center at the NSF’s National Optical and Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) and president of the American Astronomical Society. Norman’s work focuses on the phenomena of active galactic nuclei, where a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy is emitting immense energy and how that impacts the galaxy’s evolution. In this talk, she will discuss why a survey like Rubin’s LSST will give insights into the role a galaxy’s environment plays in triggering its energetic center and how access to the survey’s data will broaden the community of researchers able to work on these and other outstanding questions about our universe. 

The Museum’s Frontiers Lecture series explores cutting-edge astrophysics topics. This program is recommended for ages 16+. 

This program utilizes OpenSpace software supported by NASA under award No NNX16AB93A. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.