Latest news with #VeraRubinObservatory
CBS News
a day ago
- Science
- CBS News
First close-up view of "cotton candy" nebula captured by world's largest cosmic telescope
The world's largest telescope captured a deep-space nebula — an interstellar cloud of gas and dust that can produce new stars — in stunning detail, providing the first close-up view to date of the cosmic phenomenon. Scientists recently unveiled images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new station located in the Andes Mountains of Chile and funded by the United States, which houses a powerful telescope containing the biggest digital camera on the planet. Its precision allows the telescope to peer far into space, with galaxies tens of millions of light-years away from Earth among the subjects of the observatory's debut portraits of cosmos. Also pictured is the "cotton candy" nebula, which earned that nickname because of its bright pink and blue pattern. This annotated image offers a closer look at the region surrounding the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Officially, the swirling mass is called the Trifid Nebula, and it exists about 5,000 light-years from Earth, according to the Rubin Observatory. Nearby is the Lagoon Nebula, another colorful cloud, which is located about 4,000 light-years away and appears alongside Trifid in the observatory's latest images. Both are in the constellation Sagittarius, according to the Rubin Observatory. Zoomed-in views of the nebulae are seen in a video shared by the observatory, showcasing the Trifid and Lagoon formations at a scale never seen before. The composite image was created from more than 678 different exposures taken over a 7-hour period by the camera that powers the observatory's massive telescope. The Trifid nebula, nicknamed the "cotton candy" nebula because of its colorful swirls, is pictured in this screenshot from a video shared by the Vera Rubin Observatory. NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory The telescope's long-term mission is set to begin later this year, when it will perform nightly scans of the sky for the next decade in an effort to learn more about the early universe and some of its properties that still are not well-understood, like dark energy. Brian Stone, the chief of staff at the National Science Foundation who currently performs the duties of the foundation's director, said in a statement that the Rubin Observatory is expected to "capture more information about our Universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined." "Through this remarkable scientific facility, we will explore many cosmic mysteries, including the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the Universe," his statement said.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
A Colossal Telescope in the Desert Just Captured Galaxies We've Never Seen Before
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: After more than a decade under construction, the Vera Rubin Observatory has released its first images, which contain millions of galaxies. These first images are only the brief, initial glimpse of the observatory's 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will discover new objects in the night sky while also (hopefully) answering questions about dark matter and dark energy. As a ground-based telescope, the Vera Rubin Observatory will be a perfect companion to space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, as its sweeping view will completely scan the night sky every three days. On August 1, 2014, workers began construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) perched atop Cerro Pachón in Chile's Atacama Desert. Fast forward a decade later, and the LSST—now called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named for the American astronomer whose groundbreaking work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter—is finally ready to start doing some serious science. Its main mission will be the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (confusingly also abbreviated LSST), which will ceaselessly scan the night sky continuously for 10 years, noting every visible change along the way. Vera Rubin is particularly well-suited for this task—with a 28-foot-wide primary mirror, and 11-foot-wide secondary mirror, and the largest digital camera ever constructed, this terrestrial telescope can move its 300-ton bulk one full rotation in a half a minute at full speed, according to The New York Times. The amount of data Rubin will collect in the next year alone will be more than all other optical observatories combined. To put it mildly, it's an exciting time. To celebrate the beginning of its operation, the observatory has released the first images captured by the telescope. A combination of 678 different images, the photo above shows that brilliant Trifid nebula (top right) with the Lagoon nebula (bottom left), which is located more than 4,000 light-years from Earth. The lead image of this article (an in-depth look at the Virgo cluster) is only 2 percent of a full Rubin image, which would actually require 400 ultra high-definition TVs to display. Below is a labeled image of a swath of galaxies and stars—some of which we know, and many of which we've never seen before. 'These images vividly showcase the unprecedented power that Rubin will use to revolutionize astronomy and our understanding of the Universe,' astronomers Manda Banerji and Phil Wiseman from the University of Southampton wrote in The Conversation. 'Rubin is truly transformative, thanks to its unique combination of sensitivity, vast sky area coverage and exceptional image quality.' It's a big moment for ground-based astronomy, which has often been eclipsed by groundbreaking discoveries made by space-based telescopes like Hubble and JWST. While it's true that these floating telescopes offer a ton of benefits—chief among them being that they circumvent atmospheric interference and the increasing annoyance of satellite disruption (think Starlink)—the benefits of ground-based observatories far outweigh these visual costs. For one, these telescopes can be easily maintained and—crucially—upgraded with the latest and greatest technologies because... you know... they're on the ground. And without the need for payload restrictions, ground-based telescopes can be absolutely gargantuan (look no further than the adequately named Extremely Large Telescope, also under construction in the Atacama Desert). A quick comparison: JWST's Near Infrared Camera has a field of view of roughly 0.05 square degrees, whereas Vera Rubin has a full 9.6 square degrees. That means it can simply see way more sky than its space-based cousins. Rubin will also be able to produce incredibly high-definition photographs in just a few days, rather than the few years needed by other telescopes. At the end of its 10-year LSST mission, Rubin will provide invaluable data for investigating dark energy and dark matter, as well as information regarding some 20 billion galaxies. Rubin will also observe billions of objects on more than 800 separate occasions, which will create a kind of astronomical movie detailing the evolution of the night sky over time. Especially excitingly, it will capture asteroids as they move through the Solar System. The Observatory estimates that LSST will discover five million asteroids in the next few years alone—five times more than what humanity has discovered in the last two centuries. After decades of waiting, it's time for the science to finally commence. '[Vera Rubin] represents the culmination of about two decades of dedication, innovation, and collaboration by a global team,' Željko Ivezić, Director of Rubin Observatory Construction, said in a press statement. 'With construction now complete, we're turning our eyes fully to the sky—not just to take images, but to begin a whole new era of discovery.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Edinburgh Reporter
a day ago
- Science
- Edinburgh Reporter
The astronomical sky above Edinburgh and Lothian this month
The Earth reaches the furthest point from the Sun all year and 3 planets appear to reverse orbit. As many readers will have seen, a new astronomical research facility came online in the past few months: the Vera Rubin Observatory which hosts the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Your present interlocutor had a (very) small part in the design process. The telescope is designed to automatically image the northern sky over the next decade. It will utilize the large 3.2 GigaPixel camera footprint—equivalent to 7 full moons across—to visit each 10 square degree tile 825 times on average. This means that any transient phenomena should be picked up by the data pipelines. Of particular interest are near Earth objects (NEOs and potential Earth impactors) and supernova that will probe the dark energy content of the universe. You can explore these new images (and more to come) via or using their web application at Aphelion is the term used for when a planet and Sun are furthest apart and, for Earth, this occurs on 3 July at 9:04 pm when the Earth will be 152,087,735 km away from the Sun. Over the whole of July, though, the Sun comes closer to Earth by 248,314 km. The Sun passes from Gemini (The Twins) on 20 July at 11:51 am and enters Cancer (The Crab). We are getting longer nights now that the Solstice has passed. Daylight shortens from 17:30 (17.493 hours) on 1 July to 16:06 (16.102 hours) on 31 July so we gain 1 hour and 23 minutes of night time, by the end of the month. We are still within the summer months of perpetual twilight, though, so reducing astronomical visibility to the brightest objects in the sky. The Sun, however, is still close to 'Solar Max' which is the peak of the 11 year Sun spot cycle. This may herald better aurorae between now and the end of the year. The Moon begins the month in Leo (The Lion) and ends in Virgo (The Maiden). The first quarter of the new Lunar cycle shows up on 2 July at 8:30 pm in Virgo (The Maiden). Lunar apogee (furthest from Earth) occurs on 5 July at 3:26 am and takes the Moon to 404,662 km away from Earth—around 20,262 km further than average—subtending an angle of 29.5 arc-minutes. The full Buck Moon makes an appearance on 10 July at 9:37 pm in Sagittarius (The Archer). This is also known as the Thunder Moon. The Moon enters last quarter on 18 July at 1:38 am in Pisces (The Fishes). Lunar perigee (closest to Earth) on 20 July at 2:48 pm finds the Moon some 368,012 km away from Earth—around 16,388 km closer than average—subtending an angle of 32.5 arc-minutes. Finally, the new Moon appears on 24 July at 8:11 pm in Cancer (The Crab) beginning a new synodic (Lunar) month which will last 29 days, 10 hours and 55 minutes. For the inferior planets: Mercury remains in Cancer (The Crab) all month but comes closer by 43,342,913 km. The 'Swift Planet' decreases in magnitude from 0.40 to 5.41 (101.23 times in brightness) over the month. Mercury reaches greatest eastern elongation (from the Sun) on America's Independence Day and aphelion (furthest from the Sun) on 14 July. On 17 July, Mercury appears—at least on sky—to reverse orbit to retrograde. From then on, Mercury approaches Earth coming closest on 28 July but is lost for observing by 31 July when it reaches inferior conjunction. After this time is transitions from an evening planet to a morning planet. Venus begins the month in Taurus (The Bull) and ends in Gemini (The Twins) but recedes by 33,872,820 km. The 'Morning Star' planet decreases in magnitude from -4.14 to -4.00 (1.14 times in brightness) over the month. For the superior planets: Mars begins the month in Leo (The Lion) and ends in Virgo (The Maiden) but recedes by 28,884,201 km. The 'Red Planet' decreases in magnitude from 1.49 to 1.60 (1.11 times in brightness) over the month. Mars visits the Moon on the evening of 28 July passing 1.3 degrees north of the waxing crescent Moon. Jupiter remains in Gemini (The Twins) all month but comes closer by 18,057,658 km. This does not alter the brightness much which remains steady at -1.75 magnitudes. The 'Gas Giant' is emerging from (solar) conjunction last month becoming visible just before sunrise. In fact, on 23 July, in the pre-dawn hours, Jupiter will be 4.9 degrees south of the waning crescent Moon. Saturn remains in Pisces (The Fishes) all month but comes closer by 70,506,621 km. Saturn increases in magnitude from 0.96 to 0.80 (1.16 times in brightness) over the month. The 'Ringed Planet'—still appearing ringless until November or so!—crosses to a retrograde orbit on 14 July. You may catch a glimpse of Saturn during civil twilight on 16 July. Uranus remains in Taurus (The Bull) all month but comes closer by 62,919,841 km. Neptune remains in Pisces (The Fishes) all month but comes closer by 71,422,081 km. Neptune increases in magnitude from 7.76 to 7.71 (1.05 times in brightness) over the month. The 'Blue Giant' also crosses to retrograde on 5 July. There are four meteor showers in July but visibility is nigh on impossible either due to twilight, Moon illumination, latitude or shooting star rates but we mention them for completeness. The July Pegasids (175 JPE) peak on 10 July and are radiant from Pegasus (The Winged Horse) near the star Markab. Only 3 meteors per hour are expected during a full Moon. The parent body is thought to be comet C/1979 Y1 (Bradfield). We fare slightly better with the other 3 showers which occur between new Moon and first quarter. On 28 July, we have the Gamma Draconids (184 GDR) radiant from Draco (The Dragon) near the star Rastaban. The parent body is unknown but the ZHR is a lowly 5. Overnight on 30/31 July, we have the southern Delta Aquariids (005 SDA), radiant from Aquarius (The Water Bearer) near it's namesake star. There may be up to 25 meteors per hour but, as the name implies, viewing is much better at southern latitudes. The parent body is thought to be comet 96P/Machholz. Also on 31 July, we have the Alpha Capricornids (001 CAP) radiant near the horns of the sea goat. The ZHR is, again, low at 5. Discovered in 1871, the parent comet is 169P/NEAT but the Earth won't pass through the main cometary debris for another 2 centuries! Although both amateurs and professionals eagerly anticipate the recurrent nova known as the Blaze Star, we would prefer it to be later in the year and, certainly, outside summer's perpetual twilit sky! Vigilant observers should continue to monitor the sky near CrB epsilon-13 to see if Corona Borealis (The Northern Crown) gains another jewel. Alphecca (sometimes called Gemma or alpha-CrB) is the brightest star in the constellation, at 2.2 mag, and should guide you to this transient event. At the time of our sky map, some constellations visible are Draco (The Dragon) at zenith, Camelopardalis (The Giraffe) in the north, Pegasus (The Winged Horse) in the east, Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair) in the west, and Serpens Cauda (The Serpent's Tail) in the south. The ecliptic hosts Pisces (The Fishes), Aquarius (The Water Bearer), Capricorn (The Sea Goat), Sagittarius (the Archer), Scorpio (The Scorpion), Libra (The Scales), Virgo (The Maiden) and Leo (The Lion). The 'Summer Triangle'—Vega in Lyra (The Lyre), Altair in Aquila (The Eagle) and Deneb in Cygnus (The Swan)—is prominent at mid-to-high altitude in the south-east. The 'Diamond of Virgo'—Arcturus in Bootes (The Herdsman), Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs), Denebola in Leo (The Lion) and Spica in Virgo (The Maiden)—is low in the west. Circumpolar constellations—always above the horizon—include Cassiopeia (The Seated Queen), Cepheus (The King) and Ursa Major (The Great Bear). Like this: Like Related
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
How the largest digital camera ever made is revolutionizing our view of space
Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York's Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a simulation of the Milky Way bloom above us, while the actor Pedro Pascal — who truly is everywhere — narrated the galactic dance unfolding on the screen. It was breathtaking. But it didn't compare to what was blasted around the world just a few days later, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory began broadcasting its 'first light' — its inaugural images of the cosmos. I found myself pinching-to-zoom through a picture that contains roughly 10 million galaxies in a single frame, a vista so vast it would take 400 4-K TVs to display at full resolution. I could hold the universe itself on my screen. Perched 8,660 feet up Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, where the crystal-clear nights provide an exceptionally clear window into space, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began construction in 2015 with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy. Named for the pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, whose work on galaxy rotation helped prove the existence of dark matter, the observatory was built to run a single, audacious experiment: the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. It will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few nights to tackle four grand goals: unmask dark matter and dark energy, inventory the Solar System's asteroids and comets, chart the Milky Way's formation, and capture every transient cosmic event. What makes Rubin so special is its eye, which is a marvel. At its core is a 27-foot-wide dual mirror cast from 51,900 pounds of molten glass that is still light enough to sweep across the sky in seconds. The mirror directs a flow of light from the cosmic depths to the 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera, a 5-by-10-feet digital jumbotron that is the largest digital camera ever made. It's like a massive magnifying glass paired with the world's sharpest DSLR: Together they capture a swath of the night sky equivalent to 45 full moons every 30 seconds. And those images, which will be continuously shared with the world, are jaw-dropping. The headlining shot from Rubin's debut, nicknamed 'Cosmic Treasure Chest,' stitches together 1,185 exposures of the Virgo Cluster, our nearest major collection of galaxies, some 55 million light-years away. But the Rubin Observatory is about much more than producing pretty cosmic wallpaper. Its unprecedented scale gives it the ability to search for answers to grand questions about space science. The NSF notes that Rubin will gather more optical data in its first year than all previous ground telescopes combined, turning the messy, ever-changing sky into a searchable movie. As I've written before, the world has made great strides in planetary defense: Our ability to detect and eventually deflect asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. Rubin has already begun paying dividends toward that goal. In a mere 10 hours of engineering data, its detection software identified 2,104 brand-new asteroids — including seven near-Earth objects, heavenly bodies whose orbit will bring them near-ish our planet. That haul came from just a thumbnail-sized patch of sky; once Rubin begins its nightly scan of the whole Southern Hemisphere, it's projected to catalog over 5 million asteroids and roughly 100,000 NEOs over the next decade, tripling today's inventory. That will help NASA finally reach its congressionally mandated target of identifying 90 percent of the 25,000 city-killer-class NEOs (those over 140 meters) estimated to be out there. How powerful is Rubin's eye? 'It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids,' Jake Kurlander, a grad student astronomer at the University of Washington, told 'Rubin will double that number in less than a year.' And the images that Rubin captures will go out to the entire world. Its Skyviewer app will allow anyone to zoom in and out of the corners of space that catch Rubin's eye, including celestial objects so new that most of them don't have names. Looking at the app gives you a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the first human beings, gazing up at a sky filled with wonder and mystery. It might seem strange to highlight a telescope at a moment when the world feels as if it is literally on fire. But the Vera Rubin Observatory isn't just a triumph of international scientific engineering, or an unparalleled window on the universe. It is the ultimate perspective provider. If you open the Virgo image and zoom all the way out, Earth's orbit would be smaller than a single pixel. Yet that same pixel is where thousands of engineers, coders, machinists, and scientists quietly spent a decade building an eye that can watch the rest of the universe breathe, and then share those images with all of their fellow humans. Seeing Rubin's images brought to mind the lines of Walt Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.' I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. On days when life on our little world feels chaotic, Rubin's first-light view offers a valuable reminder: We're just one tiny part in a tapestry of 10 million galaxies, looking up from our planet at the endless stars. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Hindustan Times
7 days ago
- Science
- Hindustan Times
A new telescope will find billions of asteroids, galaxies and stars
On April 15th, at 8pm local time, the Vera Rubin Observatory recorded its very first photons of starlight. At first, the images that filled the screens in the control room on Cerro Pachón, 2,500 metres high on the foothills of the Andes in northern Chile, looked like a field of snowy static on an old television. But, zoomed in, the spots soon resolved into an uncountable number of stars and galaxies floating between enormous, wispy clouds of dust, like tiny multicoloured flecks of paint spattered across a vast black wall. 'There was this huge amount of cheering and screaming, people were getting teary-eyed,' recalls Alysha Shugart, a physicist who watched the events unfold on the night. 'Those little photons had no idea of the red carpet that was rolled out for their reception.' PREMIUM Representative photo, (Pexels) The arrival of those photons—many from ancient stars and galaxies and which had been travelling across the universe for billions of years—marked a neat moment of symmetry. It had been exactly ten years since work had started on Cerro Pachón to build the observatory; it also marked the start of a ten-year project—the legacy survey of space and time (LSST)—that will see the Rubin telescope repeatedly take ultra-high-resolution pictures of the entire night sky of the southern hemisphere every three or four days. Rubin will see more detail about the cosmos, and unlock more of its unknowns, than any machine that has come before. It will collect so much information—trillions of data points on more than 40bn new stars, galaxies and other cosmic objects—so quickly that it will transform astronomy in its wake. In its first year alone, it will double the amount of data collected so far by every other instrument in the history of optical astronomy. It will collect 20 terabytes of raw image data every night and, over the course of the LSST, will produce more than 500 petabytes of images and analysis. For the first time astronomers will also have a decade-long time-lapse of the night sky. That last part is what has scientists most expectant. Astronomical observatories until now have focused on taking detailed snapshots of tiny points in the night sky. But 'the sky and the world aren't static,' says Yusra Al-Sayyad, a researcher at Princeton University who oversees Rubin's image-processing algorithms. 'There are asteroids zipping by, supernovae exploding.' Many of those fast or transient objects can only be seen by big observatories if they happen to be pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time. 'Today we don't really have a very full, wide and deep picture of the universe,' says Leanne Guy, a physicist at Rubin. Rubin will fix that gap. Its 1.7m-long, 3,200-megapixel camera—the biggest digital camera ever built—has an enormous field of view, equivalent to an area of sky covered by 45 full Moons. The camera will be fed starlight reflected off a primary mirror that is 8.4m wide and which took scientists at the University of Arizona seven years to grind into its unique shape. Despite their size, the mirrors, telescope and the giant silver dome that houses it can all move together extremely fast. The telescope will be able to take an image every 30 seconds and its 'brain'—a piece of software known as the scheduler—will use machine-learning algorithms to automatically work out the best places to point the camera, every night, as it attempts to cover as much of the sky as possible while also avoiding obstructions, such as clouds or satellites streaking overhead. Over the course of a decade, each point in the sky will be photographed around 800 times. In an image released this week by the Rubin team, for example, stitching together ten hours of observations, astronomers identified more than 2,000 asteroids in the solar system that had never been seen before (including seven near-Earth asteroids). For comparison, around 20,000 asteroids are discovered in total every year by all other ground and space-based observatories. During the LSST, Rubin will conduct the most detailed census yet of millions of as-yet-unknown objects in the solar system, including tripling the number of known objects that could come near to the Earth and finding around 70% of asteroids classed as 'potentially hazardous', ie, bigger than 140m wide. If, as some scientists reckon, there is a ninth planet hidden in the clouds of rocks somewhere far beyond Neptune, Rubin will find it. Celestial surveillance The census-taking will stretch far beyond the solar system. Because the LSST camera will keep coming back to the same point in the sky many times during its decade-long survey, astronomers will be able to combine many images of the same location. The fainter an object, the farther away and older it is likely to be and, therefore, hundreds of stacked images will eventually reveal the very earliest stars and galaxies. By recording details—such as the colours, shapes, positions and movements—of more than 17bn stars and 20bn galaxies, Rubin is expected to produce a catalogue of the night sky that cosmologists can then use to build their most detailed picture yet of the early universe and examine how it has evolved over time. That will be crucial for two of the prime goals of the Rubin observatory—understanding the nature of dark matter and of dark energy. It is this dark universe for which Rubin was first conceived in the late 1990s. The observatory's namesake, Vera Rubin, was an American astronomer who, in the 1970s, made her name by measuring that the stars at the edge of the nearby Andromeda galaxy were moving just as fast as those at the centre, impossible if only normal matter was present. Her discovery provided evidence of the existence of 'dark' matter, which cannot be seen and interacts with normal matter only through gravity. Two decades later, scientists discovered an even bigger hole in the universe—a mysterious substance was found to be accelerating the rate at which space was expanding. Dark energy, it turned out, made up 68% of the mass in the universe and dark matter made up around 27%. Only around 5% comes from the familiar 'normal' matter that makes up stars, planets, dust and everything on Earth. Understanding how the invisible dark universe behaves depends on better observations of the visible one. One of the ways in which Rubin's LSST will help is by measuring how the light from very distant galaxies is distorted by the gravitational force of the matter between them and Earth. These measurements will give astronomers details about how matter is arrayed in the universe and also how it is moving. Both are important clues to the nature of the dark universe. The study of dark energy, in particular, will get a boost. The phenomenon was discovered in the 1990s when scientists were studying the movements of the few dozen supernovae that they knew about at the time. Rubin will, according to the scientists working there, be a 'supernova factory', potentially discovering billions more of these exploding stars, providing cosmologists with a vastly bigger data set to study more deeply and precisely, and with much better statistics, the way that dark energy behaves. Rubin's data will not stay on the mountaintop in Chile. Less than ten seconds after the LSST camera's shutters close every day, everything will be transferred, through dedicated optical fibres, to computers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California (backups will go to data centres in France and Britain). At SLAC, an automated process will first clean up the images and carry out an initial analysis that will look for objects that have, say, appeared for the first time or significantly changed position or brightness since the previous night. These changes—there will probably be millions per night—will be quickly winnowed down (by more specialised algorithms) into a priority list and passed on to other observatories around the world who can then follow up with more detailed direct measurements of their own. All of this will happen autonomously. 'There's absolutely no way any human being could go through these alerts by eye,' says Dr Guy. 'There's no way.' The LSST is scheduled to begin at Rubin in October. In the meantime, the instruments sitting on Cerro Pachón will continue to be tested, re-tested and calibrated. Though Rubin's primary mission is set for now, the scientists who have built the observatory know that what they ultimately have at their disposal is a discovery machine. 'What I'm most excited about seeing from Rubin in the long term,' says Dr Guy, 'are the things we've never even thought about.' Correction (June 24th): In the original version of this story, we underestimated the number of supernovae that scientists knew about in the 1990s.
