Largest camera ever built captures eye-popping images of millions of distant stars and galaxies
The first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory showed off a breathtaking preview of its capabilities — capturing millions of stars and galaxies light-years from Earth, along with thousands of never-before-seen asteroids.
The observatory — perched atop Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes Mountains — will train its high-powered 27.5-foot Simonyi Survey Telescope at the night sky over the next decade to give astronomers an unprecedented look at the cosmos.
3 The approximately $810 million Vera C. Rubin observatory took nearly two decades to complete.
RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/T. Matsopoulos
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The newly released images were compiled from around 10 hours of test observations, showing swirling clouds of pink and golden dust that make up the Trifid nebula and a large cluster of galaxies known as the Virgo cluster — both located thousands of light-years away.
In all, the video made from the first 1,100 test images shows around 10 million distant galaxies in the camera's wide-view lens, a tiny fraction of the approximately 20 billion galaxies the Rubin observatory is hoping to capture over the course of its work.
'NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will capture more information about our universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined,' National Science Foundation Chief of Staff Brian Stone told CNN.
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The test images also uncovered 2,104 asteroids that had never before been seen in our solar system, including seven 'near-Earth' asteroids — those within about 30 million miles of Earth's orbit.
Scientists at the observatory said none of them pose any threat to our planet.
Images of the asteroids are expected to be shared with the public on Monday.
Typical telescopes based in space or on the ground are capable of spying around 20,000 asteroids each year, while the Rubin Observatory is expected to discover millions of the rocky space objects in just the next two years alone, according to the US National Science Foundation, which funded the observatory along with the US Department of Energy.
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3 First images included the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, both thousands of light-years from Earth.
AP
The primary objective of the $810 million observatory, which took approximately 20 years to build, is to create an ultra-high-definition movie of the images it captures over the next 10 years known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
The resulting time-lapse compilation will show details like comets and asteroids zooming by, exploding stars and distant galaxies transforming over time.
3 Another image captured showed a large cluster of galaxies called the Virgo cluster, representing just a fraction of the 20 billion galaxies the observatory is expected to image over the next 10 years.
AP
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'[Rubin] will enable us to explore galaxies, stars in the Milky Way, objects in the solar system, and all in a truly new way. Since we take images of the night sky so quickly and so often, (it) will detect millions of changing objects literally every night,' Aaron Roodman, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford University, told the outlet.
The observatory's unique capabilities will help other powerful telescopes direct their focus, acting as a 'discovery machine' to discover other interesting areas of the universe that warrant a closer look.
The telescope's namesake, Vera C. Rubin, is considered one of the most influential female astronomers of all time.
She is credited with providing some of the first evidence proving the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up much of our universe.
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