Dr. Igor Andreoni

The night sky is far from static. Stars explode, black holes shred passing stars, neutron stars collide and forge the heaviest elements in the periodic table. New telescopes will open new windows onto the observations of these dramatic cosmic events. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun operations in Chile, scanning the entire southern sky every few nights with the world’s largest digital camera. I will present efforts from the Transients and Variable Stars Scientific Collaboration to study the dynamic sky with Rubin. Meanwhile, the upcoming Argus Array is under construction at my home institution in North Carolina. Argus will take optical time-domain a step further, continuously filming the entire Northern sky every second with 1,200 telescopes working in unison to form a combined 122 Gigapixel camera. Together, Rubin and Argus will define a new era of time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy. I will present some exciting science cases that these observatories enable, from the discovery of gravitational-wave counterparts to the exploration of an entirely new regime of sub-minute optical transients that remains almost completely uncharted.