TIME has named University of California, Davis Distinguished Research Professor Tony Tyson, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, to the 2026 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
The results of two decades of scientific and technological innovation were unveiled today with the reveal of the first imagery captured by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a facility jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
Tony Tyson, a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, recounts the origin of the Rubin Observatory and his decades-long journey to make the facility a reality.
Coming online in 2025, the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's enormous, unrelenting eye on the sky will create the biggest, most data-rich movie ever made — a 10-year, high-precision chronicle of trillions of cosmic events and objects across space and time.
