Bright Spots

Science is flourishing in some labs and fields more than others

- REBECCA BOYLE

The sun sets behind the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile in May 2024.

IN HER FIRST YEAR OF GRADUATE SCHOOL at Stanford University, back in 2021, Sydney Erickson knew only that she was going to be a physicist.

She rotated through different research groups, from particle physics to cosmology, until she started hearing buzz about a giant camera being built on campus for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. “I was drawn toward that community,” she says, recalling those involved with the telescope, which turned on last summer in the Chilean Andes. “Rubin drove me into cosmology, I would say.”

Now Erickson is finishing her doctoral degree and developing new ways to pin down the universe’s accelerating rate of expansion. She focuses on huge astrophysical objects such as massive galaxies, whose gravity magnifies the light of more distant targets. By studying the arrival time of light from these so-called gravitational lenses, cosmologists can calculate how much the universe expanded during different time intervals. It’s an incredibly complex measurement requiring both lots of images captured repeatedly, which Rubin provides, and deep finesse, which Erickson and her computer models offer.

The $800-million Rubin observatory was designed and built largely with federal money. That federal purse has long been the primary source of funding for research and development in the U.S., growing from $21.3 billion in 1956 to $156.1 billion in 2024, adjusted for inflation, according to the National Science Foundation. The funds, which flow through numerous entities, from the NSF and the National Institutes of Health to NASA and the Department of Energy, have helped usher in a golden age of American science.