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Rubin Observatory Goes Live With Real-Time Sky Alerts, Sending 800,000 in First Night

A University of Washington–built pipeline delivers minute‑scale notices to community brokers ahead of the LSST start later this year.

Overview

  • On Feb. 24, the system issued 800,000 public notifications of sky changes, typically reaching users within about two minutes of each image.
  • The Alert Production Pipeline, developed at the University of Washington with SLAC operations support, is designed to scale toward roughly seven million notices per night.
  • During observing, a new patch of sky is imaged about every 40 seconds and data are sent from Chile to SLAC for rapid difference‑imaging against templates.
  • Official community brokers — ALeRCE, AMPEL, ANTARES, Babamul, Fink, Lasair, Pitt‑Google, SNAPS and POI Broker — use machine learning to filter the public stream, with citizen‑science access via platforms such as Zooniverse.
  • The live feed enables rapid follow‑up on early supernovae, near‑Earth asteroids and other transients and marks a key milestone before the decade‑long Legacy Survey of Space and Time.