On October 26th, Operations began on a 10-year project to create the largest (by far) and most complete (by far) time-lapse movie of the Universe ever made. A massive telescope and state-of-the-art camera, software, and survey methods will create a detailed inventory of our Solar System, the most complete map of our Milky Way galaxy, a record of most anything that changes in the nighttime Southern sky, and the most powerful dataset yet created for exploring the nature of dark matter and dark energy. In this talk, I will share the goals and discoveries to date before the operational phase has even begun.

Larry Gladney is Dean of Science and previously the Phyllis A. Wallace Dean for Diversity and Faculty Development for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. He is also Professor of Physics. He came to Yale from the University of Pennsylvania where he was the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor for Faculty Excellence in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Dean for Natural Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences. At Penn he held a secondary appointment as Professor of Education in the Higher Education division of the Penn Graduate School of Education and was formerly Chair of Penn’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, Chair of the Penn Faculty Senate and Director and Principal Investigator of the Penn Science Teacher Institute. Dr. Gladney focuses his research at the intersection of experimental particle physics and cosmology where we attempt to understand the origins of and fundamental connections between matter, energy, space and time. He is particularly interested in future explorations of the cause for the accelerated expansion of the universe.

Prof. Gladney was a member of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration that co-discovered the top quark and of the BaBar experiment that measured matter-antimatter asymmetry in the bottom quark system. At CDF, he led the effort for the first exclusive reconstruction of a B meson at a hadron collider – the start of a rich era of studies with bottom quark particles in this environment. Dr. Gladney’s most recent work is in the mission planning and simulation of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) mission for Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile. LSST is designed to use multiple methods to measure the detailed expansion history of the universe over cosmological time.

Dr. Gladney is co-author or author of more than 600 peer-reviewed publications.