The World’s Largest Camera Is About to Unveil Its First Photos of Space. Here’s How to Follow Along With a Live Stream
The revolutionary Vera C. Rubin Observatory will unveil new insights about our universe—and you can catch a first look at a local event or online on Monday
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On a mountaintop in Chile sits the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a giant telescope equipped with the world’s largest digital camera. In just a few days, the world will get to see its first-ever images and videos.
The telescope is still in its commissioning phase, as engineers run final tests before its official survey starts later this year—but the first light hit its detectors in April. On Monday, the observatory is unveiling its early sightings, allowing people around the world to see photos and videos of the southern sky in ultra-high definition. You can join local watch parties or follow the live stream from the comfort of your own home starting at 11 a.m. Eastern time.
Once the observatory begins full operations, the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey telescope, along with its 3.2-gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera the size of a car, will capture the cosmos with stunning definition. Each snapshot will image an area of sky about the size of 45 full moons over the course of 30 seconds, then the telescope will take just five seconds to train its instruments on the next region. Stitched together, Rubin’s observations will offer unprecedented views of the entire Southern Hemisphere sky roughly every three days.
This data will be compiled into a time-lapse record of outer space, creating “the largest astronomical movie of all time,” according to the observatory’s website.
“There have been a whole lot of surveys, but they don’t go wide, fast and deep all at the same time,” says Tony Tyson, Rubin’s chief scientist and an astrophysicist at the University of California, Davis, to Katrina Miller at the New York Times. In this way, the telescope will achieve “something that’s never been done before.”
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Over the span of ten years, the Rubin Observatory will capture distant stars and supernovas, billions of galaxies and millions of new comets and asteroids. It’ll also be searching for dark matter and dark energy—the mysterious components that make up more than 95 percent of the universe.
Dark matter is invisible, but its gravity interacts with matter in the cosmos. Dark energy is the little-known force that drives the universe’s accelerating expansion. These can’t be directly observed, but Rubin’s data will help astronomers learn more about them, based on their influence on objects in space.
Scientists will be able to “map out where the dark matter is by how we see the light bending as it travels to us,” explains Alex Drlica-Wagner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, to Marina Koren at National Geographic. Observations of supernovas, meanwhile, can help them better understand dark energy.
It’s fitting that the observatory will offer insights on dark matter and dark energy, given its namesake. American astronomer Vera C. Rubin found pivotal evidence of dark matter in the late 1970s by mapping out the rotation of galaxies. She realized their movements could only be explained by an unseen mass. By peering into this dark universe, the observatory will carry on her legacy.
The new data will probably have some surprises in store for researchers, too. “We’ll have this data set that will give us, in addition to the things we planned for, things we didn’t plan for,” says Renée Hložek, a cosmologist at the University of Toronto, to Daniel Clery at Science. “You don’t know what’s going to happen until you open the box.”
While the observatory was funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, scientists and space lovers around the world will be able to benefit from its insights into the cosmos.
“We are doing this for all of humanity,” Hiranya Peiris, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge in England, tells the New York Times. “It is how we understand our place in the universe.”
