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A mirror as large as a city bus and the most powerful digital camera in the world: the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, high in the mountains of Chile, can at a glance impressive features. The new American telescope must change our view of the universe, and the first photos have arrived.
The observatory, named after the American astronomer Vera Rubin, has a resolution of 3200 megapixels, 67 times as much as a new smartphone. Over the next ten years, the camera will make about a thousand images of the southern starry sky night after night and eventually portray the entire visible sky about 800 times. The goal is to create a huge data set with around 40 billion celestial bodies, from stars in the Milky Way to distant galaxies.
That enormous amount of data should ultimately help to explain the mystery of dark matter and dark energy, which also does the European space telescope Euclid research. By better understanding the movements of the galaxies, it has to be more clear about the role of that material that must be there, but that we cannot immediately see.
“The discoveries can lead to the emergence of completely new areas in astronomy,” says Adam Miller of Northwestern University in the US. “It is very likely that the Rubin telescope will find things that nobody knows yet.”
In addition to research into dark matter and energy, the enormous viewer will map the Melkweg, but also small objects in the solar system and researching supernovas (exploding stars) and other cosmic phenomena. The telescope can also discover asteroids that pose a potential danger to the earth.
The project already started in the last century. Since 2006, work has been done in the US Mirrors and the work on the mountain in Chile started in 2011. The mountain was chosen because it is a high and dry place where astronomers suffer less from the earth atmosphere. After the telescope was completed, it took months of testing and calibration before the Vera C. Rubin could deliver the first spectacular images from space. They were presented today.
On one of those images you can see the Trifidnevel and the Laguneenevel, thousands of light years of the earth. A second shows, among other things, two spiral systems of the Virgocluster, about 50 million light years far away.
Guillem Megias, expert at the observatory, emphasizes the importance of the observations. “When we received the first photo, that was a special moment,” he says at the BBC. “When I started here I came across someone who had worked on this since 1996. I was born in 1997. Then you realize that this is the work of generations of astronomers.”
