Decoding the Universe: Enabling Discovery from New Maps of the Sky

Dark matter. Dark energy. A sky that changes every night. Most of the universe is made of things we cannot see - and even the parts we can see are in motion, with stars exploding, objects flaring, and new things appearing that weren't there the night before. A new generation of cosmic surveys is now mapping all of it in extraordinary detail -- including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, that has begun a ten-year movie of the southern sky that will catalog tens of billions of objects and flag millions of changes every night. These telescopes produce more data in a single night than an astronomer could examine in a lifetime. That is where a new generation of AI and