Placed on the top Cerro Pachón Mountain in Chile, 8684 feet high in the Atacama desert, where arid air creates one of the best conditions in the world to see the night sky, a modern telescope, unlike everything that was built earlier, began studying space. Vera C. Rubin observatory, named after the astronomer who discovered evidence of dark matter in 1978About 20 billion galaxies, 17 billion stars in milk road, 10 million supernovations and millions of smaller facilities in the solar system are expected.
“We are absolutely guaranteed that we will find something that blows people,” says Anthony Tyson, the main scientist of the Rubin observatory. “Something that we cannot tell you because we do not know it. Something unusual.”
This huge astronomical sequence comes from a 10-year observatory Hereditary study of space and timewhich is to start this year. The first scientific photos from the telescope were publicly published today.
An unprecedented ruby study regarding the night sky promises to be transformed by our understanding of space. What happened at the early stages of creating a planet in the solar system? What types of exotic, high -energy explosions occur in the universe? And how do the esoteric force that scientists call dim energy?
“You would usually design a telescope or a project to answer one of these questions,” says Mario Juric, a scientist of data management for Rubin. “What makes Rubin so powerful is that we can build one machine that provides data to the entire community to solve all these questions at the same time.”
The telescope will create a decaded film with a high resolution of the universe. It will generate about 20 terabytes of data per day, the equivalent of three years of Netflix streaming, increasing about 60,000 terabytes to the end of the survey. Only in the first year Rubin will develop more data than all previous optical observatories combined.
“You must have an almost fully automated software package behind it, because no man can process or even look at these images,” says Juric. “The vast majority of pixels that Rubin collects from heaven will never be visible by human eyes, so we have to build eyes to go through all these images and identify … the most unusual objects.”
These amazing objects-ancate objects from other solar systems, supermassive black holes devouring stars, high-energy explosions without a well-known source-secrets about the activities of the cosmos.
“You are building such a telescope and this is the equivalent of the construction of four or five telescopes for specific areas,” says Juric. “But you can do it all at once.”
Observatory at the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile.NSF-Doe Vera C. Rubin Observatory/A. Pizarro D.
Telescope like no other
The Rubin Observatory, placed in a 10-story building, is equipped with an 8.4-meter basic mirror and a 3200 megapixel digital camera, the largest in history. The telescope rotates on a specialized attachment, taking the 30-second exhibitions of the sky before quickly stop the modern position. Rubin takes about 1000 photos every night, photographing the whole sky in the southern hemisphere in unusual details every three to four days.
“It’s amazing engineering,” says Sandrine Thomas, a design scientist who is working on the optical instruments of the Rubin Observatory.