Latest news with #surveyofspaceandtime
Sydney Morning Herald
24-06-2025
- Science
- Sydney Morning Herald
A new telescope will find billions of asteroids, galaxies and stars
On April 15, 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, 2500m 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.' 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 40 billion 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. Loading 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, 3200-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 Age
24-06-2025
- Science
- The Age
A new telescope will find billions of asteroids, galaxies and stars
On April 15, 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, 2500m 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.' 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 40 billion 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. Loading 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, 3200-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.
