The Rubin Observatory: A Discovery Machine for Astronomers in the Near-Earth Asteroid Problem and Detection of Most Observable Objects
“It’s a very special telescope,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with Carnegie Science. “It’s going to find everything that goes bump in the night, to some degree.”
This survey will collect information on more than 40 billion stars, galaxies and other objects. Rubin Observatory says there is more data than has ever been written in a language in human history because each one will be checked out hundreds of times.
A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing of what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomy study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years.
“As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story. Yusra AlSayyad, who oversees image processing for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, says that what astronomy has given us is just snapshots.
The images are fantastic. They’re incredibly high resolution. But they’re just a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s been captured,” says Kevin Reil, a staff scientist with SLAC National Accelerator Lab who is working at the observatory in Chile. The small section of the observatory’s view of the Virgo cluster is what the newly released image shows. “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.
The leader of the observatory’s leadership team says that they will spot millions of changing objects every night since they take rapid images of the night sky.
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.”
Already, in just over 10 hours of test observations, the observatory has discovered 2,104 never-before-seen-asteroids, including seven near-Earth asteroids, none of which pose any danger.
Named after an astronomer famous for her research related to dark matter, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is perched on a mountaintop in Chile. It’s equipped with a specially-designed large telescope, as well as a car-sized digital camera that’s the biggest such camera in the world.
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. Each image is so detailed, displaying it would take 400 ultra high-definition television screens.
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.
There are young stars in the area of the Milky Way that have ionized hydrogen and 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. The result was the rich colors of the final product due to the fact that each image was taken with one of four filters.