February 19, 2016 – As part of last week's announcement that LIGO has directly detected gravitational waves emitted by a pair of merging black holes, the LIGO collaboration has released a map showing the probable location of the wave’s origin. In anticipation of future gravitational-wave detections of merging compact objects involving neutron stars, we can hope to spot such events as visible lights sources accompanying gravitational-wave emission. It would take many hours to survey a huge swath of hundreds of square degrees of sky with traditional telescopes,but LSST would be able to slew to the region of interest in seconds and have the most probable location imaged in minutes. Once in operation, LSST will be a valuable tool for increasing our understanding of gravitational waves involving neutron stars by detecting the optical counterparts of the powerful interactions that trigger the event. [Image credit: LIGO/Alex Mellinger]
Financial support for Rubin Observatory comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Cooperative Support Agreement No. 1202910, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515, and private funding raised by the LSST Corporation. The NSF-funded Rubin Observatory Project Office for construction was established as an operating center under management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). The DOE-funded effort to build the the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera (LSSTCam) is managed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an
independent federal agency created by Congress
in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.
NSF and DOE will continue to support Rubin Observatory in its Operations phase. They will also provide support for scientific research with LSST data.
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