'The Greatest Cosmic Movie Ever Made': The World's Largest Digital Camera Begins a Historic, Decade-Long Survey of the Night Sky
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The largest digital camera on Earth has started a ten-year survey of the universe from its perch atop a mountaintop in Chile.
After a year of testing the camera and the telescope to which it’s attached, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun photographing the sky as part of its long-awaited Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Every night over the next decade, the Rubin will point its 3200-megapixel camera—which is the size of a small car—to the southern sky, snapping an image every 30 to 40 seconds.
The observations can be stitched together into larger images, and the same areas will be scanned every few nights to create a time-lapse record. “Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” says Brian Stone, acting director of the National Science Foundation, in a statement. The NSF and Department of Energy’s Office of Science funds the observatory, which cost about $800 million to develop and build.
The LSST is designed to see everything—“even the things we don’t know we’re looking for yet,” says Phil Marshall, the deputy director of the telescope’s operations at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in a statement to the New York Times’ Katrina Miller. By scanning the same patches of the sky at various times and with six different filters, the Rubin can capture faint details that previously eluded scientists. Space scientists are looking forward to using Rubin’s data to spot stars, supernova explosions and galaxies, among other intriguing objects.
It’ll also help uncover more clues about dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up most of the universe’s matter, and dark energy, a mysterious force thought to drive the accelerated expansion of the universe. “I’m excited because we are finally beginning to start answering the questions that Rubin set out to provide answers to,” says Arun Kannawadi Jayaraman, a cosmologist at Duke University who works with data from the Rubin, to Hannah Richter at Sky & Telescope. “And I’m nervous because, although we have been dealing with the immense amount of data Rubin Observatory has been generating during its [testing] phase, it is now getting real,” he adds.
Rubin was an American astronomer whose observations in the 1970s pointed to the existence of dark matter, strange stuff that doesn’t emit or reflect light and is estimated to make up about 85 percent of the universe’s matter. Each night, the facility collects 10 to 20 terabytes of data—hundreds of 4K movies’ worth—and sends up to seven million alerts about changes in the night sky so that scientists can act fast if something catches their eye. During the LSST’s first year, the Rubin is expected to gather more data than that collected by all previous visible-light telescopes combined.
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