Time-domain astronomy:
Time-domain astronomy is the study of how astronomical objects change with time. Though the study may be said to begin with Galileo’s Letters on Sunspots, the term now refers especially to variable objects beyond the Solar System. This may be due to movement or changes in the object itself. Common targets included are supernovae, pulsating stars, novas, flare stars, blazars and active galactic nuclei. Visible light time domain studies include OGLE, HAT-South, PanSTARRS, SkyMapper, ASAS, WASP, CRTS, and in a near future the LSST at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “The time-lapse telescope that will transform our view of the universe,” Stuart Clark, NewScientist (3 September 2022, paywall):
All-in-all, this represents a coming of age for a discipline called time-domain astronomy, which seeks to understand how celestial objects change with time. “It is going to be a giant leap,” says Mario Jurić, director of the Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology (DIRAC Institute) at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is a data management project scientist for the LSST. “We’re going to see 10 per cent of everything that’s in the Milky Way with this one machine.” That accounts for around 20 billion stars, and because of Rubin’s light-gathering power and speed, it will detect even slight changes in the brightness and position of objects.
One may think of science as bounded by quantum mechanics (subsuming chemistry, if you will), the study of the smallest objects and phenomena, at one end of the spectrum, and astronomy, the study of the largest. It’s crude, yes, and astronomy is a result of quantum mechanics – or so I surmise – but the point here is that both ends of the spectrum are difficult enough to study in terms of process and transformation that they often require special observational aids tuned to their needs. Quantum mechanic scientists employ cameras and other detectors sampling the data stream in very small time chunks; astronomers must build telescopes, but have had trouble continuously monitoring their subjects.
Time-domain astronomy is a bid to remedy this serious problem.
