New Telescope Captures Stunning Images of Billions of Asteroids, Galaxies, and Stars
The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile recently captured its first starlight photons, revealing a breathtaking view of stars and galaxies amidst wispy clouds of dust. This marks the beginning of a groundbreaking ten-year project to survey the Southern Hemisphere's night sky, providing unprecedented insights into the cosmos.
On April 15, at 8pm local time, the Vera Rubin Observatory recorded its very first photons of starlight. The images showed stars and galaxies floating between clouds of dust, like tiny multicoloured flecks of paint on a black wall.
A physicist, Alysha Shugart, described the excitement in the control room as the photons arrived after travelling across the universe for billions of years.
The Rubin telescope will conduct the legacy survey of space and time (LSST) over ten years, capturing ultra-high-resolution pictures of the Southern Hemisphere's night sky every three or four days. It will collect trillions of data points on over 40 billion cosmic objects, transforming astronomy with its speed and detail.
In its first year, the telescope will double the data collected by all previous optical astronomy instruments combined. It will produce over 500 petabytes of images and analysis during the LSST, providing astronomers with a decade-long time-lapse of the night sky.
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