"The Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A New Eye Opens on the Universe" by Prof Christopher Stubbs

The Rubin Observatory is making the transition from construction into full operation. This facility will provide a decade-long time-lapse movie of the Southern sky in 6 passbands. The unprecedented combination of aperture (8.4 m primary, f/1.2 beam) and field of view (~10 square degrees) makes Rubin a powerful discovery machine. Professor Stubbs will briefly review the project's history and describe how co-added and difference images can be used for projects ranging from searches for potentially hazardous asteroids to observational cosmology. About the Speaker: Christopher Stubbs joined Harvard in 2003 as a Professor of Physics and of Astronomy. His research interests lie at the intersection of cosmology, particle physics, and gravitation. His research career started with experimental tests of gravitation, performing precision measurements to explore possible modifications to gravity. He was on the faculty at UCSB and was then a member of the University of Washington faculty for a decade before moving to Harvard in 2003. He served as chair of Harvard’s Physics Department from 2007 to 2010 and as Dean of Science from 2018 to 2024.  Stubbs is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiative in Research, the NASA Achievement Medal, and a co-recipient (with other members of the High-z Supernova Team who discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe) of the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Stubbs was awarded a McDonnell Centennial Fellowship and a Packard Fellowship and currently serves on the advisory panel for the Packard Foundation. He is a member of the JASON advisory group, in connection with his interest in arms control and technical aspects of international security issues. Stubbs was the inaugural Project Scientist for the LSST (now Rubin) sky survey telescope project and remains deeply involved in that effort.