Penn State is a partner organization in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will be the next major leap forward in charting the optical sky. The LSST is a planned 8.4-meter, 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky. It will be built in northern Chile at the superb site of Cerro Pachon.

In a relentless campaign of 15-second exposures, the LSST will cover the available sky every three nights, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, active galaxies, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The superb images from the LSST will be used to trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the distortions in their shapes produced by concentrations of dark matter, providing multiple constraints upon the mysterious dark energy. Prof. Niel Brandt is the consortium's lead scientist for the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) program. Penn State astronomers plan to use the LSST to study active galaxies, stellar tidal disruptions by supermassive black holes, the most distant galaxies, gamma-ray bursts and fast optical transients, novae in the local supercluster, and brown dwarfs. The torrents of data that will be delivered by the LSST also present an enormous challenge in data mining, and Penn State astrostatisticians are developing relevant algorithms that will help with this challenge.

The spectra of three quasars with redshifts larger than six taken with the Low Resolution Spectrograph of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. The objects were first identified as quasar candidates in SDSS imaging data by their unusual colors. Note the strong absorption just blueward of the Lyman-alpha emission lines; this absorption is produced by neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium.