The biggest camera ever built releases the first image of the Cosmos
I sat on top Chile’s Cerro Pachong Mountain, the Atacama Desert, is 8,684 feet tall, and the dry air creates some of the best conditions in the world, allowing you to see the night sky. Bella C. Rubin Observatory, named after an astronomer In 1978, we discovered evidence of dark matter.It is expected to reveal about 20 billion galaxies in the Milky Way, 17 billion stars, 10 million supernovaes, and millions of small objects within the solar system.
“We are absolutely guaranteed to find something that inspires people,” says Anthony Tyson, chief scientist at Rubin Observatory. “There’s something we can’t tell you, because we don’t know that. Something extraordinary.”
This incredible astronomical transport comes from the decade of the observatory A legacy investigation of space and timeIt is scheduled to start later this year. The first scientific images from the telescope have been made public today.
Rubin’s unprecedented investigation into the night sky promises to change our understanding of the universe. What happened in the early stages of the planetary layers of the solar system? What kind of exotic, high-energy explosions occur in space? And how do scientists call secret power? Dark Energy Are you actually working?
“We usually design telescopes and projects to go to get to either of these questions,” said Mario Juric, a data management project scientist at Rubin. “What makes Rubin so powerful is that we can build one machine that provides data to the entire community to solve all of these questions at once.”
Telescopes create high-resolution films that span a decade of space. It generates approximately 20 terabytes of data per day, equivalent to three years of streaming Netflix, and accumulates approximately 60,000 terabytes by the end of the investigation. In the first year alone, Rubin compiles more data than all previous optical observers combined.
“We can’t even process or view these images, so we need to have a nearly fully automated software suite behind it,” Juric says. “The majority of the pixels Rubin is trying to gather from the sky are never seen by the human eye, so you need to go through all these images and build the software’s eyes to identify the most unusual objects.”
Those rare objects –asteroid From other solar systems, Super Massive Black Hole Devour the stars and a high-energy explosion without known sources – secure a secret about the work of the Cosmos.
“You build a telescope like this, which is equivalent to building four or five telescopes for a particular area,” Juric says. “But you can do it all at once.”
An observatory about the summit of Celopachen, Chile.NSF-DOE VERA C. RUBIN OBSERVATORATORY/A. Pizzaro D.
An unparalleled telescope
Housed in a 10-storey building, Rubin Observatory is equipped with an 8.4-meter primary mirror and the largest ever built 3,200-megapixel digital camera. The telescope rotates on a special mount, exposes the sky for 30 seconds, then immediately pivots to a new position. Rubin takes about 1,000 images each night, taking extraordinary details around the entire Southern Hemisphere every 3-4 days.
“It’s incredible engineering,” says Sandrine Thomas, a project scientist working on optics at Rubin Observatory.