Ever imagined seeing a golf ball on the floor of the moon in a picture taken from the earth? This is now doable with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (VRO), the world’s newest astronomy facility, situated on considered one of the peaks of mountain Cerro Pachòn in northern Chile. Jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, this 8.4-metre telescope gives an unprecedented view of the universe.
The 3,200-megapixel (MP) camera put in on the VRO has 67-times extra pixels than an iPhone 16 Pro camera. The massive mirrors and distinctive design enable the telescope to seize wide-angle 3.5-degree-diameter pictures, equal to the dimension of seven full moons in the sky.
These distinctive options will enable the VRO to scan the complete southern hemisphere sky each three nights, which it is going to do constantly for 10 years. This ultra-high definition, vast angle survey of the sky will thus create the longest astronomical time-lapse film of all time, permitting for a lot of new discoveries in the photo voltaic neighbourhood and deep house alike.
Ten million alerts
While the future holds countless potentialities for this subsequent era observing facility, the VRO was constructed to serve 4 main science objectives. One of them is knowing the nature of darkish matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 80% of all matter in the universe.
But whereas darkish matter can’t be seen, it causes galaxies to clump collectively in particular methods. Astronomers will examine the distribution of galaxies close to and much with a view to perceive the properties of darkish matter, and work out what it’s made from.
Since the VRO will scan the complete southern hemisphere sky time and again, scientists can even get a fairly good concept of how the sky appears to be like usually. This will enable them to select up any adjustments in the sky relative to photographs taken a number of days in the past, a number of weeks in the past, and, ultimately, a number of years in the past.
In reality its state-of-the-art expertise permits the VRO to check every picture to the ‘general’ picture of that a part of the sky inside 60 seconds and problem an alert if any adjustments are detected. When absolutely operational, the VRO will generate round 10 million alerts from 20 TB of uncooked knowledge collected each night time. That’s equal to greater than three years of streaming movies.
The altering sky
While most of the adjustments in the sky are as a consequence of fast-moving objects akin to comets, there exist different celestial entities whose place and brightness can change over time. For occasion, whereas 1.5 million asteroids — rocky our bodies orbiting the solar between Mars and Jupiter — have been found, solely 30% of these smaller than 140 m are recognized up to now. The VRO is anticipated to extend this determine to 90% and permit scientists to find ‘killer asteroids’, which regardless of their comparatively small dimension may devastate our planet in the event that they strike it.
With its unprecedented decision, the VRO can increase the depend of recognized photo voltaic system objects by 10x, discovering many new comets and asteroids, dwarf planets like Pluto, and even a ninth planet if it exists.
All galaxies work together with their neighbours gravitationally. Small satellites are torn aside by the gravity of larger galaxies as they merge with them. The VRO will map the distribution of stars in the Milky Way, serving to astronomers determine ‘streams’ of stars that after belonged to smaller galaxies that blended with the Milky Way hundreds of thousands of years in the past.
Given its distinctive long-term survey functionality, the VRO can even uncover hundreds of thousands of objects of variable brightness. For occasion, dying stars explode as supernovae, which brighten up for a number of days earlier than their nuclear furnace is extinguished. Some stars might have planets, or one other star orbiting them, blocking their gentle from reaching us often. Other variable stars might change in brightness as a result of their outer surfaces pulse over a number of hours to some days.
The first pictures
In a June 23 press convention, the observatory revealed that the $473 million facility had already found 2,104 asteroids in per week of observations. All different efforts mixed at present discover round 20,000 asteroids a 12 months.
While considered one of the preliminary pictures shows swirling clouds of mud and fuel in the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae 9,000 lightyears from the earth, one other exhibits a piece of the Virgo galaxy cluster situated 54 million lightyears away.
The big pictures captured by the VRO are a journey by house and time: Milky Way stars shining in an array of colors from blue to purple in the foreground, teams of galaxies with reddish hues transferring away from us in distant house, and a collection of gravitationally interacting galaxies in a close-by cluster sandwiched in between.
The VRO is distinguished from its predecessors, together with the James Webb Space Telescope: whereas they’re extra delicate, they will solely observe a small patch of the sky at a time.
Vera Rubin’s legacy
The VRO was initially proposed in 2001 and was then referred to as the ‘Large Synoptic Survey Telescope’ (LSST). It was renamed as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in 2019.
Rubin (1928-2016) was an American astronomer. She was the first to point out that spiral galaxies rotated so quick that if their constituents have been simply stars, they need to fly aside. The implication was that there are massive quantities of unseen matter holding galaxies collectively, the substance we name darkish matter right this moment.
Despite her pioneering work, gender bias denied Rubin a Nobel Prize. Now, the VRO honours her and her colleagues by observing billions of galaxies as a part of the ‘Legacy Survey of Space and Time’, which can assist astronomers perceive the nature of darkish matter, whose existence first got here to gentle in Rubin’s work.
Smriti Mahajan is an astronomer and science communicator selling STEM schooling by astronomy. theastronomyclass@gmail.com
