Latest news with #ŽeljkoIvezić
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
First Images From the World's Largest Camera Are Paving the Future of Astronomy
First Images From the World's Largest Camera Are Paving the Future of Astronomy originally appeared on L.A. Mag. On June 23rd, over 300 public and private Watch Parties tuned in to get a glimpse of the First Look images from Rubin Observatory, according to a Rubin Observatory press release. The reason? This observatory features the world's largest ever camera, an 8.4-meter telescope, and is at the forefront of the current astronomy works so well for three primary reasons: its scope, the detail of the images, and the time it takes to capture said images. For example, the image taken of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae utilized two trillion pixels of data and a combination of 678 exposures to create a 5-gigapixel image. Taken in just under 7.2 hours, this stunning image layers the large amount of different exposures to cast the image into enormous detail. Coupled with the extremely wide range of the camera, viewers can now see the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae in striking and comprehensive first images are the product of over two decades of work from a global team, according to Željko Ivezić, Director of Rubin Observatory Construction. The facility, jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation, was built at the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile, where the high elevation, dry air, and dark skies provide an ideal location for astronomical observations. According to Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the observatory 'demonstrates that the United States remains at the forefront of international basic science and highlights the remarkable achievements we get when the many parts of the national research enterprise work together.' Brian Stone, performing the duties of NSF director, details these 'remarkable achievements' by stating how Rubin will 'capture more information about our Universe than all optical telescopes throughout history combined,' including information about dark matter and dark observatory's relationship with dark matter is deeply embedded within the observatory's history, specifically concerning its namesake. The observatory is named after Vera C. Rubin, a pioneering U.S. astronomer who found conclusive evidence for dark matter. Dark matter and dark energy are important because they are key players in what is facilitating our universe's expansion, according to NASA. So what's next for the Vera Rubin Observatory? According to CNN, the observatory will make the first scientific observations of the Southern Hemisphere (also known as 'first light') on July 4th. Looking ahead, over the next ten years, the observatory will take 1000 images of the Southern Hemisphere every night as part of the observatory's primary mission to meticulously capture the universe's changes: the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. These images will not only be important for astronomical discoveries, but also for planetary defense, as having more precise images will allow us to better observe and predict asteroids that may potentially impact the Moon or the Earth. Additionally, the observatory seeks to bring cutting-edge astronomical data and images to the general public through the interactive, user-friendly SkyViewer app. The app offers both guided and free-form exploration of select Rubin images as well as an interactive sonification that encourages users to experience the wonder of the cosmos through an endless soundscape. This story was originally reported by L.A. Mag on Jun 27, 2025, where it first appeared.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
The Rubin Observatory found 2,104 asteroids in just a few days. It could soon find millions more
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. It was weirdly emotional on Monday (June 23) as several grainy white specks streaked across my computer screen while ambient rhythms buzzed in the background. Those specks were part of a film that played during the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's highly anticipated first image release conference — and they each represented an asteroid that had just been discovered. It felt like witnessing something hugely profound, and there are two reasons why. First of all, to put it simply, with just a few nights of data, the Rubin Observatory team was able to identify 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system — seven of which are categorized as near-Earth objects. (No, none are expected to strike our planet. Don't worry). For context, there are approximately a million known asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood; over the next few years, Rubin could very well hike that figure up to five million. "This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid," Željko Ivezić, Deputy Director of Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during the conference. "We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years." This is astonishing in itself — talk about an exemplary first impression — but there's still that second thing that makes Rubin's new asteroid data incredible. They can be formatted as movies. For some context about Rubin, this observatory is our brilliant new ground-based eye on the universe, and is located at the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón in Chile. It has the ability to image giant swaths of the sky using the world's largest digital camera — and when I say giant, I mean giant. One of its first presented images, for instance, features a bunch of glowing, hazy galaxies of all shapes and sizes. It's difficult not to daydream when looking at a couple of lovely lavender spirals that represent realms comparable to our entire Milky Way. But what you see below in this image is only 2% of the full Rubin view: The plan is for Rubin to capture such massive, high-resolution images of the southern sky once every three nights for at least the next 10 years. You can therefore consider it to be a super-fast, super-efficient and super-thorough cosmic imager. Indeed, those qualities are perfect for spotting some of the smallest details trailing through the space around our planet: asteroids. "We make movies of the night sky to see two things: objects that move and objects that change brightness," Ivezić said. "Objects that move come in two flavors. Stars in our galaxy move, and they move slowly. Much faster objects are asteroids." Zooming into a tiny portion of one of Rubin's images, Ivezić pointed out that there are actually invisible photobombers present. He was talking about the asteroid streaks Rubin's software so kindly removed from the main attraction (I mean, look at that spiral). However, the fact that those asteroids can be removed from an image means they can be precisely isolated to begin with, making it possible to really focus on them if you want to — something that isn't always possible with zippy, fleeting space objects. In fact, it's tremendously difficult to record an asteroid at all. "Asteroids, they disappear after you get one picture of them," Ivezić said, calling Rubin's ability to image small objects orbiting the sun "unprecedented." In the Rubin image Ivezić called out to showcase the observatory's asteroid-tracking capabilities, the asteroid streaks are seen in different colors. This is because each corresponds to one exposure used to create the final image. You can think of it as different images stitched together to create a final view of the asteroids' trajectories. And to take things a step further, if you slap a few of these datasets together, you can indicate asteroid motion against the more static background of stars and galaxies — like a movie. This feature of Rubin should be huge not only because it'd allow scientists to better study asteroid movements and discover new near-Earth objects, but also for humanity's efforts in planetary defense. Over the last couple of years, scientists have really started to question how we can protect our planet if an asteroid were headed our way. NASA's wildly successful DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission — which sent a spacecraft on a death mission to crash into an asteroid and see if the object's trajectory can be changed — was arguably the feat that brought planetary defense to the public eye. It'd also be remiss not to mention all the recent anxiety surrounding Asteroid 2024 YR4, which was potent enough to even penetrate the jokes of a random comedy show in New York City I went to around the time it was making headlines. 2024 YR4 briefly had a head-turning likelihood of hitting our planet before that likelihood shot down to nil. There was even a hearing about asteroid safety in May, held by the U.S. House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, during which U.S. Representatives expressed their concern that asteroid defense may be impacted by President Trump's major science funding cuts. All of this is to say that I imagine a state-of-the-art asteroid detector is very welcome in the scientific community right now. To really illustrate the ultimate promise of Rubin's asteroid adventures, Ivezić brought up a simulation of all asteroids expected to orbit our sun. RELATED STORIES — Vera C Rubin Observatory reveals 1st stunning images of the cosmos. Scientists are 'beyond excited about what's coming' — Satellite streaks: Can the huge new Vera Rubin Observatory function in the megaconstellation age? — World's largest digital camera to help new Vera Rubin Observatory make a 'time-lapse record of the universe' (video) "This blue donut is a simulation of all asteroids we expect there," he said. "All of these new discoveries are found in this one narrow slice of this big donut. In two or three years, after we start LSST later this year, we will sweep around and discover all of the millions of asteroids."
San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- Science
- San Francisco Chronicle
Cutting-edge astronomy facility with Bay Area ties releases incredible space photos
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a cutting-edge astronomy facility with Bay Area connections, unveiled its first images taken with its record-setting camera in a presentation Monday, including pictures of swirling galaxies and nebulae. The snapshots are a preview of what will be a 10-year movie of the cosmos that scientists say will enable significant scientific advances, including an inventory of the solar system and insights into dark matter and dark energy. 'This observatory is the greatest astronomical discovery machine ever built,' said Željko Ivezić, director of the Rubin Observatory's construction, during the presentation. The observatory is located atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in central Chile. But its car-sized camera, the largest digital camera ever built, was constructed at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park. It would take 400 ultra-high definition TV screens to display a single image taken by the 3,200-megapixel camera. Employees and visitors eagerly watched the First Look briefing at a SLAC auditorium in Menlo Park on Monday morning, breaking out in applause when images of galaxies appeared on screen. The new camera will take images of the entire southern night sky every three nights, for 10 years. Scientists expect to detect wandering asteroids and comets, supernovae, variable stars and exotic events, like stars being torn apart by black holes. Cataloging galaxies in the night sky also will provide insight into dark matter, a mysterious substance that scientists can't see, but affects the distribution of galaxies in the universe. This continuous movie is 'an astronomer's dream come true," said Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomy professor at the University of San Francisco. The observatory is named for Vera Rubin, an American astronomer whose pioneering work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter. The Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, and operated by SLAC and NSF NOIRLab. 'The movie has started, the camera is running and we're going to see our cosmos unfold before us,' said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in a short video.
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
1st images from the Vera C Rubin Observatory will drop on June 23. Here's why that's such a big deal
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. On Monday (June 23), the public and the wider science community will get their first look at images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This will arguably mark the biggest moment in astronomy since the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were revealed in the summer of was built by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science on the mountain Cerro Pachón, high in the dry atmosphere of northern Chile. When its operational, the observatory will construct what Director of Rubin Observatory's construction, Željko Ivezić, described as the "greatest movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever assembled." The 8.4-meter telescope, equipped with the largest digital camera ever, will conduct the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), capturing the entire southern sky over Earth every 3 nights. To get you properly prepped for the first images from Rubin, spoke to an array of scientists who will work with the observatory, as well as others who are just excited to see what images and data this groundbreaking instrument is set to reveal. However, be warned: they're tight-lipped about just what images we will see."Until the images are revealed next week, all I can say is that people are going to be amazed at what we're able to see already," Andrés Alejandro Plazas Malagón, a researcher at Stanford University and part of the Rubin Observatory's Community Science Team, told "I am excited about using the largest digital camera in the world for astronomy — the LSSTCam, with 3.2 gigapixels — to survey the entire sky visible from its location in Chile over a 10-year period. This is something that has never been done before. "We will be able to gather more data than any galaxy survey to date to help answer fundamental open questions in astronomy." Mireia Montes is a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) who will use Rubin to track stars drifting between galaxies via the faint "intracluster light" they emit."Rubin is exciting because it is going to be huge! Surveys are normally limited by how much area they cover or how deep they go, following a method called the 'wedding cake strategy'," Montes said."This means they cover a large area but are not very detailed, or small areas in great detail. Large areas are good for having lots of galaxies, but depth is better for seeing faint things like the details of galaxies or very distant galaxies. You usually choose whether to go for depth or area. Rubin is going to provide both depth and area! This will help us to see things that are not usually very clear. "The general public will see that the night sky is not as dark as we see it. In fact, when you look at deep images, you can see that there are objects (like stars and galaxies) everywhere you look. I think people are going to be amazed by the number of objects in this image, just as we were by the Hubble Deep Field ... but on a very different scale, as Rubin's camera is huge. Rubin is going to show us the universe in a totally new way!" The wide-field view of Rubin will see the LSST gather data that could finally solve lingering mysteries surrounding dark energy, the force that accounts for around 68% of our universe's matter-energy content and causes the expansion of the cosmos to accelerate. It is somewhat startling to consider that despite all of humanity's advances in science, we still only know what around 5% of the universe's contents are. All stars, planets, moons, animals, plants, and inanimate objects, everything we see is "baryonic matter" composed of atoms, but there is a lot more to the universe than this. The rest of the matter-energy content is known as the "dark universe." Rubin has the right stuff to shine a light on the dark universe, which is divided into dark energy and dark matter, both of which account for about 17% of the universe's matter and energy but remains invisible because it doesn't interact with light. "Studies of dark energy and dark matter are highly complementary with the Rubin Observatory and its LSST," Plazas Malagón said. "For dark energy, the LSST will measure the shapes and properties of billions of galaxies — an order of magnitude more than current photometric galaxy surveys — across cosmic time. "This will allow Rubin to probe the growth of the large-scale structure of the universe, namely the cosmic web, which is dominated by dark matter, and the expansion history of the universe." Plazas Malagón explained that the LSST will revolutionize the study of dark matter by mapping the sky with unprecedented depth and precision. This will enable the detection of the smallest dark matter halos that surround small satellite dwarf galaxies and wrap around stellar streams. The observatory will also use a phenomenon first predicted in 1916 by Einstein called "gravitational lensing" to investigate the distribution of dark matter through large galaxies."It will test dark matter properties such as self-interactions, warm or ultra-light masses, and the presence of compact objects like primordial black holes," Plazas Malagón continued. "The LSST will also constrain exotic dark matter models — including axion-like particles — through stellar population measurements, and provide high-resolution maps of large-scale structure to explore how dark matter and dark energy interact. "Combined with other experiments, LSST will offer powerful, complementary tests of dark matter's fundamental nature." Among the most curious dark energy findings since its discovery in 1998 are hints from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) that this mysterious force is weakening over time. The wide-field view of Rubin could help confirm this, which would prompt revisions to the standard model of cosmology, or Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM), a model built on a constant dark energy strength. "The LSST will collect vastly more data, which will help determine whether this is a real effect or just a fluctuation," Plazas Malagón explained. "In addition to studying dark energy, LSST will allow us to test the standard model of cosmology in other ways—examining the cold dark matter and dark energy hypotheses in the context of alternative models, including modified theories of gravity." Luz Ángela García Peñaloza is a cosmologist in Bogotá, Colombia, specializing in dark energy. She explained why she is so excited about Rubin, its first images, and its ongoing mission. "Rubin's first image release is an incredible milestone for the astronomical community. This observatory will cover the largest patch of the sky ever, capturing the light of approximately 20 billion galaxies. Rubin (or LSST) is not only an impressive telescope that will complement the cosmic cartography we are doing with other galaxy surveys, but also a fantastic piece of engineering that will be online for the next 10 years. We don't know yet what kind of images they will release on Monday, but I'm looking forward to seeing a deep field with tens of thousands of galaxies and stars. Remarkably, Vera Rubin is going to observe many, many galaxies in one night; thus, I expect to see beautiful images of the sky. Rubin will help us constrain the Large Scale Structure of the universe and, along the same lines, the nature and dynamics of dark energy." While Rubin will excel at studying galaxies en masse, some scientists will be interested in using its detailed view to look at what lies between those galaxies, namely, faint intracuster light. "These processes are linked to the formation of clusters of galaxies, which are the largest structures bound by gravity in the universe," Mireia Montes is a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC), told "Our understanding of the processes that form intracluster light is limited by small datasets. With Rubin, however, we will finally have the depth and numbers required to understand this light much better." Montes added that the filters employed by Rubin will enable astronomers to determine the type of stars between galaxies that give rise to intracluster light. That should then lead to the revelation of the origins of these "orphan" stars and how they came to drift between galaxies. Rubin may also excel in spotting another type of faint stellar outcast, so-called "failed stars" or brown dwarfs. These are bodies that form like stars from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust, but fail to gather enough mass to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines what a main sequence star infrared vision of Rubin's Simonyi Survey Telescope combined with its wide field of view and ability to see deep into space, will make it the perfect instrument for discovering faint, infrared-emitting objects like brown dwarfs. In fact, researchers have predicted that Rubin could detect thousands of brown dwarfs in the Milky Way, increasing our catalog of these "failed stars" by 20 times. That could help us better understand the mass limit at which a star "succeeds" and becomes a star rather than a brown dwarf, and thus how our galaxy took shape. Giuseppe Donatiello is an amateur astronomer from Italy who, thus far, has discovered a staggering 11 new dwarf galaxies in the local neighborhood of the Milky Way."Thanks to deep surveys, important discoveries have come in the Local Group, in particular, bizarre and decidedly unconventional objects have emerged. Rubin will certainly bring other similar discoveries, pushing their detection further," Donatiello said."The ability to go very deep will allow us to better define the timing in cosmic evolution, from the first stars to the current galaxies. Having such an instrument at our disposal does not limit the possibilities of observation, and we must have an open mind to anything new."Nature is more imaginative than we are!" This cursory list above is far from the extent of the phenomena that will be investigated by Rubin as it conducts the LSST. "There will be major improvements in almost every area of astronomy," Montes said. "Understanding better our own Milky Way, the evolution of galaxies, finding more low-mass galaxies that will allow us to understand better how galaxy formation occurs at those masses, mapping the mass of our universe, and therefore understanding better our universe." Plazas Malagón added that some of the other key questions the groundbreaking observatory could answer include: Are there undiscovered planets in the outer solar system (e.g., Planet Nine or Planet X)? What explosive and transient events occur in the universe? How do stars evolve and die? What are the electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave and neutrino events? What is the structure of the Milky Way's halo, disk, and bulge? What is the local galactic neighborhood like? Are there hazardous asteroids or comets that could impact Earth? Phew! Little wonder scientists (and are excited! Related Stories: — How the Rubin observatory could detect thousands of 'failed stars' — World's largest digital camera to help new Vera Rubin Observatory make a 'time-lapse record of the universe' (video) — Rubin Observatory aces 1st image tests, gets ready to use world's largest digital camera "I'm thrilled to see what the scientific community will do with this data," Alejandro Plazas concluded. "I'm especially excited about the new questions that will emerge — questions we haven't even imagined yet. We've built a discovery machine, and that's incredibly exciting to me. "One of the most exciting aspects is the unexpected discoveries that lie ahead!"
