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Published October 23, 2025 | Version Accepted
Journal Article Open

OpenUniverse2024: A shared, simulated view of the sky for the next generation of cosmological surveys

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Institute of Space Sciences
  • 2. ROR icon Duke University
  • 3. ROR icon Argonne National Laboratory
  • 4. ROR icon The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
  • 5. ROR icon Northeastern University
  • 6. ROR icon SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
  • 7. ROR icon ETH Zurich
  • 8. ROR icon The Ohio State University
  • 9. ROR icon Utrecht University
  • 10. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 11. ROR icon Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya
  • 12. ROR icon University of Maryland, Baltimore County
  • 13. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 14. ROR icon University of Pennsylvania
  • 15. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 16. ROR icon University of Chicago
  • 17. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 18. ROR icon Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • 19. ROR icon Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
  • 20. ROR icon Carnegie Mellon University
  • 21. ROR icon Stanford University
  • 22. ROR icon University of Pittsburgh
  • 23. ROR icon Baylor University
  • 24. ROR icon University of Hawaii at Manoa
  • 25. ROR icon Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas
  • 26. ROR icon Newcastle University

Abstract

The OpenUniverse2024 simulation suite is a cross-collaboration effort to produce matched simulated imaging for multiple surveys as they would observe a common simulated sky. Both the simulated data and associated tools used to produce it are intended to uniquely enable a wide range of studies to maximize the science potential of the next generation of cosmological surveys. We have produced simulated imaging for approximately 70 deg2 of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Wide-Fast-Deep survey and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, as well as overlapping versions of the ELAIS-S1 Deep-Drilling Field for LSST and the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey for Roman. OpenUniverse2024 includes i) an early version of the updated extragalactic model called Diffsky, which substantially improves the realism of optical and infrared photometry of objects, compared to previous versions of these models; ii) updated transient models that extend through the wavelength range probed by Roman and Rubin; and iii) improved survey, telescope, and instrument realism based on up-to-date survey plans and known properties of the instruments. It is built on a new and updated suite of simulation tools that improves the ease of consistently simulating multiple observatories viewing the same sky. The approximately 400 TB of synthetic survey imaging and simulated universe catalogs are publicly available, and we preview some scientific uses of the simulations.

Copyright and License

© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported in part by the OpenUniverse effort, which is funded by NASA under JPL Contract Task 70-711320, “Maximizing Science Exploitation of Simulated Cosmological Survey Data Across Surveys”. 

Argonne National Laboratory’s work was supported under the U.S. Department of Energy contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.

The DESC acknowledges ongoing support from the Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules in France; the Science & Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom; and the Department of Energy and the LSST Discovery Alliance in the United States. DESC uses resources of the IN2P3 Computing Center (CC-IN2P3–Lyon/Villeurbanne - France) funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231; STFC DiRAC HPC Facilities, funded by UK BEIS National E-infrastructure capital grants; and the UK particle physics grid, supported by the GridPP Collaboration. This work was performed in part under DOE Contract DE-AC02-76SF00515.

Work in the Roman HLIS PIT is supported by NASA grant 22-ROMAN11-0011, “Maximizing Cosmological Science with the Roman High Latitude Imaging Survey.”

Work in the Roman SN PIT is supported by NASA under award number 80NSSC24M0023, “A Roman PIT to Support Cosmological Measurements with Type Ia Supernovae”.

Work in the RAPID PIT is supported by NASA under the award number 80NSSC24M0020, “RAPID: Roman Alerts Promptly from Image Differencing”.

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, operated under DOE Contract DE-AC02-76SF00515, is the host laboratory for DESC and manages support for the DESC pipeline scientist and computing infrastructure teams.

This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. This work was done through a special ALCF Discretionary award using all of Theta before the system was retired. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility using NERSC award ERCAP0026324. This research used resources at the Duke Compute Cluster.

This paper makes use of software developed for Vera C. Rubin Observatory. We thank the Rubin Observatory for making their code available as free software at http://pipelines.lsst.io/.

The work of A.K. was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. L.G. acknowledges financial support from AGAUR, CSIC, MCIN and AEI 10.13039/501100011033 under projects PID2023-151307NB-I00, PIE 20215AT016, CEX2020-001058-M, ILINK23001, COOPB2304, and 2021-SGR-01270. The material is based upon work supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC24M0006. B.M. acknowledges support from Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) under award number E-26/210.203/2019.

This paper has undergone internal review by the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. The internal reviewers were Arun Kannawadi and Chris Walter.

Data Availability

The data underlying this article are available through the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/theory/openuniverse2024/overview.html. The transient models are also available through Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/records/14749318.

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2501.05632 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/theory/openuniverse2024/overview.html (URL)
Dataset: https://zenodo.org/records/14749318 (URL)

Funding

Jet Propulsion Laboratory
70-711320
United States Department of Energy
DE-AC02-06CH11357
United States Department of Energy
DE-AC02-05CH11231
United States Department of Energy
DE-AC02-76SF00515
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
22-ROMAN11-0011
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NSSC24M0023
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NSSC24M0020
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
E-RCAP0026324
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
PID2023-151307NB-I00
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
PIE 20215AT016
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
CEX2020-001058-M
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
ILINK23001
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
COOPB2304
Agencia Estatal de Investigación
2021-SGR-01270
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80GSFC24M0006
Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
E-26/210.203/2019

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Astronomy Department, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Accepted