Smile, universe! It’s time to shine with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
The telescope, more than two decades under construction, will offer a comprehensive view of the night sky like never before seen by astronomers. The project scientists revealed some of the first images released on Monday (23).
“The Rubin Observatory is the largest astronomical discovery machine ever built,” said željko Ivezić, director of the construction, during the presentation of the first images. He pointed out that, for the first time, the number of celestial objects observed will be higher than the number of people living on Earth.
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Over the next decade, the images will be united to create “the biggest movie of all time.”
Rubin is a partnership between the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (NSF). It was built in a mountain in northern Chile, on the Andes’s buttresses, on the edge of the Atacama Desert. The tall and dry location offers clear skies to observe the cosmos.
The vast data set of the observatory will allow astronomers to investigate dark energy, a force that drives the accelerated expansion of the universe, as well as dark matter, a mysterious substance that behaves like a galactic glue. Closer to Earth, the Observatory will identify asteroids that may be on a collision route with the planet.
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The observatory is named after Vera Rubin, an astronomer known for finding evidence of dark matter in the cosmos.
Two of the first images show excerpts from the Virgin cluster, a group of galaxies about 65 million light years.
In the foreground, bright stars inside our galaxy, the Milky Way. In the background, many extremely distant galaxies, with reddish tone, because, in an expanding universe, distant objects move away at high speed. In the middle, galaxies of the Virgin cluster. Blue points within the galaxies are stellar formation regions, with younger and younger stars.
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But each shared passage is just a small part of the complete image produced by the telescope.
The level of detail in the Rubin images is impossible to transmit on a computer screen or newspaper page.
Therefore, the Rubin team has developed SkyViewer, which allows people to zoom in and out in the giant images. “We needed to create dynamic ways to share data,” said Steven Ritz, a physicist at the University of California in Santa Cruz and Rubin project scientist in an interview. “We knew the images were so big that if you did zoom out, they would look like porridge. You wouldn’t see the richness of the details. You had to zoom.”
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With SkyViewer, anyone can take the cosmos in their pocket, through the smartphone.
“You can have 6 billion pixels in your pocket,” said Ritz. “It’s really cool.”
The software tool also allows you to listen to the images. “We built an interaction capacity to experience the data, not with our eyes, but with our ears,” explained Ritz. “This is important for some people who, of course, only have this ability. But I think it’s valuable to everyone.”
Ivezić also showed asteroid tracks that “photobped” the cosmic images. Observatory software automatically removes photos from the distant universe and calculates its orbits. In a few nights of observation, 2,104 new asteroids were discovered.
Seven of them are asteroids close to Earth, although none are on a collision route with the planet. The others are in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.
Another image showed a vibrant and pink view of the trifid and lagoon fogs.
The two extensive clouds of dust and gas, thousands of light years of Earth, in the constellation of Sagittarius, have been often photographed by amateurs and professional astronomers. More powerful instruments captured more detailed but close -sized photos, showing only a small part of the scene.
Blue regions are illuminated by the light of young and hot stars and scattered by dust, explained Clare Higgs, a specialist in the dissemination of Rubin. The pink colors probably come from excited hydrogen atom emissions, and the dark filaments are dust strips.
The construction of the Rubin Observatory began a decade ago. The complete telescope recorded its first signs of light on April 15.
Rubin is not the largest telescope in the world, but it is a technological wonder. The main structure, with an 8.4 meter wide primary mirror, a 3.4 meter secondary mirror and the world’s largest digital camera, floats on a thin oil layer. Magnetic motors rotate the 300 tonne structure – at high speed, it can complete a complete rotation in just over half a minute.
Its unique design allows the telescope to observe both in depth and width. Scanning the whole sky every three to four days for 10 years, it will discover millions of stars in explosion, passing space rocks and distorted space-time regions that produce deformed images of distant galaxies.
“You have never seen it all, captured at once, with this depth and so many objects,” said Ritz. “That, I would say, it’s new. And how beautiful it is.”
This high -speed operation allows Rubin to quickly walk the sky, taking about 1,000 photos a night.
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