The Rubin Observatory: A Discovery Machine for Stars, Galaxies, and Other Objects in the Milky Way and the Solar System
“It’s a very special telescope,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with Carnegie Science. “It will find everything that goes on in the night, to some degree.”
This survey will compile observations on about 40 billion stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. Each one will be checked out hundreds of times, giving astronomers access to about 60 petabytes of raw data, which the Rubin Observatory says is “more data than everything that’s ever been written in any language in human history.”
Astronomers were astonished by the 3,200 millimeter digital camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the largest camera in the world. When the telescope was finished, the images were created from shots taken during a trial.
“As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story. Yusra AlSayyad, who works for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, says that astronomy has given us snapshots so far.
“These images are fantastic. They’re incredibly high resolution. Kevin Reil, a staff scientist with SLAC, says that they are just a small portion of what has been captured. He notes that the newly released image that shows many galaxies is small section of the observatory’s total view of the Virgo cluster. “We just happened to zoom in on this little piece.”
Built with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, the facility will collect a mind-boggling amount of data on the entire southern night sky during a decade-long survey slated to start later this year.
“Since we take images of the night sky so quickly and so often, we’ll detect millions of changing objects literally every night,” says Aaron Roodman of Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who is part of the observatory’s leadership team.
He calls the Rubin Observatory a “discovery machine” that will enable astronomers to “explore galaxies, stars in the Milky Way, objects in the solar system, and all in a truly new way.”
A total of 2,104 new asteroids have been discovered in just over ten hours of test observations,none of which pose any danger.
The Rubin is a US-led facility, which sits atop the mountains of central Chile. Every 3–4 nights, the observatory will be able to view the entire southern sky with a large field of view. The Hubble Space Telescope has better sensitivity to small details and can take in one small part of the sky at a time.
The camera is controlled by an automated system that moves and points the telescope, snapping pictures again and again, to cover the entire sky every few days. 400 ultra high-definition television screens would be needed to show the image on each screen.
This should let astronomers catch transient phenomena that they otherwise wouldn’t know to look for, such as exploding stars, asteroids, interstellar objects whizzing in from other solar systems, and maybe even the movement of a giant planet that some believe is lurking out in our own solar system, beyond Pluto.
“Wow. You want to observe the grandeur of the Universe? This is the way to observe it!” says astronomer Robert Williams, former head of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
The ionized hydrogen in the region of the Milky Way where the Trifid and Lagoon Nebula are found is dense with young stars that are in the process of forming. The picture was created from 678 separate exposures taken by the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope in just over seven hours. Each image was monochromatic and taken with one of four filters, resulting in the rich colours of the final product.
