“We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears. It’s way too much for one person to sift through and monitor.”
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile sent 800,000 automated alerts on its first night of public access. It captures 1,000 enormous images per night, compares each one to a reference map of the sky, and flags everything that moved or changed. Within minutes. The number is expected to grow to millions nightly. This is what happens when you point the most powerful survey telescope ever built at the sky and let algorithms do the watching. Every asteroid, supernova, and cosmic event gets flagged and pushed to astronomers in near real time. The firehose of discovery is now fully open.