Perch in Chile’s Cerro Pachón mountain, 8,684 feet high in the Atacama desert, where dry air creates some of the best conditions in the world to watch the night sky, a new telescope that, with anything previously built, began to investigate the Cosmos. Named after astronomers who discovered evidence of dark matter in 1978, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to show about 20 billion galaxies, 17 billion stars, the Milky Way, 10 million supernovaes and millions of smaller objects in solar systems.
“We can definitely guarantee to find something that is shocking,” said Anthony Tyson, chief scientist at Rubin Observatory. “We can’t tell you something because we don’t know. Something unusual.”
This massive astronomical transport will come from the Observatory’s 10-year heritage survey of space and time, which is scheduled to begin later this year. The first scientific images of the telescope were released to the public today.
Rubin’s unprecedented investigation of the night sky is expected to change our understanding of the universe. What happened in the early stages of planet formation in the solar system? What kind of exotic high-energy explosion happened in the universe? How does the esoteric power of what scientists call dark energy actually work?
“Usually, you’ll design a telescope or project to answer one of these questions,” said Mario Juric, a Rubin data management project scientist. “What makes Rubin so powerful is that we can build a machine that provides data to the entire community to solve all of these problems at once.”
The telescope will make a decade-old high-resolution film of the universe. It will generate about 20 data that holds data a day, the equivalent of three years of streaming Netflix, which piled up about 60,000 tons at the end of the survey. In the first year alone, Rubin will have more data than all previous optical observations combined.
“You have to have a software suite that is almost completely automated behind it, because no one can handle or even see these images,” Juric said. “The vast majority of the pixels Rubin will never collect from the sky will never be seen by the human eye, so we have to build the software eyes to browse all these images and identify…the most unusual objects.”
These unusual objects—source agents from other solar systems, supermassive black holes swallowing stars, high-energy explosions without known sources—contact secrets about the functioning of the universe.
“You build a telescope like this, which is equivalent to building four or five telescopes for a specific area,” Juric said. “But you can do it all right away.”
Observatory on the top of the mountain in Cerro Pachón, Chile.NSF-DOE VERA C. Rubin Observatory/a. Pizarro D.
Telescopes and no other
The Rubin Observatory is housed in a 10-story building with an 8.4-meter main mirror and a 3200-megapixel digital camera, the largest build ever built. The telescope spins on a dedicated mount and makes a 30-second sky exposure before quickly turning to the new position. Rubin will take about 1,000 images each night, shooting the sky throughout the Southern Hemisphere in extraordinary detail every three to four days.
“It’s an amazing project,” said project scientist Sandrine Thomas.
