Antonella Palmese stands in a white hallway with large windows. She smiles at the camera.

Scialog: Early Science with the LSST Awards Palmese, Collaborators

Heidi Opdyke

麻豆村鈥檚 Antonella Palmese is part of a team awarded funding through , a three-year initiative to鈥痠gnite discovery with鈥痶he Vera C. Rubin Observatory鈥檚 Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Palmese, an assistant professor of physics and an observational cosmologist, works at the interface between gravitational wave experiments and large sky surveys.

Along with Mithi Alexa de los Reyes from Amherst College and V. Ashley Villar from Harvard University, Palmese is looking at using the LSST to identify binary systems of supermassive black holes that reside in the centers of galaxies. They hope to find binary black hole systems in low-mass dwarf galaxies 鈥� small, dimly lit systems with as few as a thousand stars 鈥� which have never been observed.

鈥淚dentifying and characterizing such a binary AGN in a dwarf galaxy would shed light on the evolution of supermassive black holes, as well as inform future searches for gravitational wave sources,鈥� Palmese said. The work will lay the foundation for when new gravitational wave detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) come online in the 2030s.

The collaboration came from discussions during the 2025 Scialog LSST conference,鈥痟eld Nov.14-17 in Tucson, Arizona, which included more than 50 astronomers, cosmologists, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, computational modelers, data scientists and software engineers from the U.S., Canada and Chile.

鈥淭hese grants fund teams that have not previously collaborated,鈥� Palmese said. 鈥淚鈥檓 looking forward to exploring how we can tackle this novel challenge together.鈥�

Rubin Observatory and the LSST

The LSST survey began in late 2025, and optimization efforts are ongoing. The first data preview with observations from the LSST Camera is scheduled for July 2026.

Once fully operational, the LSST will take a new photo of the southern sky every 40 seconds to create what promises to be the most detailed timelapse of the universe ever created.

Each night, the observatory will capture millions of events where the brightness of objects changes over time. Transient events can be massive supernovae or minor asteroids and can take fractions of a second to years to complete. Images of these events contain key clues to the history of the universe.

To process the enormous amount of data that the observatory will produce, behind the scenes, Palmese and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon's McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics are creating tools to turn Rubin's stunning visuals into scientific breakthroughs to advance astrophysics and fuel new technologies in fields like AI, imaging and data infrastructure.

The award is part of the second year of Scialog: Early Science with the LSST. Each of the 19 individual awards associated with this year鈥檚 projects provides $60,000 in direct research support designed to spark transformative discoveries and new collaborations ahead of the Rubin Observatory鈥檚 full survey operations

鈥痠s short for 鈥渟cience + dialog.鈥� Created in 2010 the (RCSA), Scialog initiatives aim to accelerate breakthroughs by building a creative network of scientists that crosses disciplinary silos and by stimulating intensive conversation around a scientific theme of global importance.

Funding for the Scialog: Early Science with the LSST awards is provided by the鈥疕eising-Simons Foundation,鈥痶he Leinweber Foundation and philanthropist Kevin Wells.