By joining the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Discovery Alliance in spring 2024, Illinois Institute of Technology's astronomy program has advanced significantly. Assistant Professor of Physics Emily Leiner is leading this initiative, viewing it as a pivotal move that will offer new research opportunities for students and faculty.

"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 aims to study dark energy, dark matter, map solar system objects, and detect transient events like supernovae. It will be conducted by the 8.4-meter Rubin Observatory under construction in Chile, expected to capture its first images in summer 2025. The telescope will photograph the entire sky every few nights, producing vast amounts of data for alliance members to analyze.

"The Rubin Observatory is going to generate terabytes and terabytes of data every single night that needs to be analyzed," says Leiner. She emphasizes the importance of having tools ready for data analysis and training researchers on their use: "That’s one of LSST’s big missions: what tools do we need? How can we do trainings where we actually plug researchers into people who have developed these tools?"

Leiner's research focuses on studying transient events, particularly interactions within binary star systems that can lead to mergers resulting in explosive events. While bright supernovae are well-known transients, fainter explosions also provide valuable insights into stellar evolution.

"Some of these mergers are hard to see because they are fainter," says Leiner. "We’re going to detect a lot of these fainter transients that we haven’t detected very many of... 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."

Processing this extensive data involves artificial intelligence (AI). In September, Illinois Tech became a satellite partner in the SkAI Institute for AI in Astronomy, which aims to develop innovative AI tools for astronomy research with support from a $20 million National Science Foundation grant.

"At the institute, they’re developing AI lesson plans... 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 Chicago area."

Since starting its astrophysics program in 2016, Illinois Tech's involvement with both the LSST Discovery Alliance and SkAI Institute marks significant progress as it continues exploring space.

"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."