The Universe's Darkest Mysteries Are Coming Into Focus
To reach the top of Cerro Pachón, a mountain at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers take a drive of two hours up a winding, bumpy road. The lush greenery at the mountain's base slowly gives way to the browns and yellows of the desert. Eventually, telescopes rise in the distance, the sun glinting off their metal domes.
The newest eye on the cosmos is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which houses the largest digital camera ever built. For the next 10 years, the telescope will take advantage of its station under Chilean skies, some of the darkest on Earth, to conduct an astronomical survey more ambitious than any scientific instrument that came before it.
From that survey, astronomers hope to learn about the birth of our Milky Way galaxy, the mysterious matter comprising much of the cosmos, and how the universe evolved into its current arrangement. Perhaps they will even uncover clues about its fate.
They will also use the telescope to home in on millions of transient objects, 'faint things that go bang, explode or move in the night,' said Tony Tyson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Davis. That includes gorging black holes and collisions of dense, dead stars.
But the most valuable discoveries, astronomers say, lie beyond the reaches of their imagination.
'The universe always throws us surprises,' said Michael Strauss, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. With Rubin, he said, 'we don't yet know what those surprises will be.'
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Sorcha makes predictions about how much data will be generated by the Rubin Observatory, and how many discoveries could be made as a result. 'The number that I like to quote is, it took all of mankind about … 225 years to discover the first one and a half million asteroids. And in less than two years, Rubin is going to double that, and then go on and triple that a few years later,' Juric says. University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, director of Rubin construction, joyfully raises his fist in the observatory's control room in Chile after seeing the first on-sky engineering data captured with the LSST Camera. (Credit: RubinObs / NOIRLab / SLAC / DOE / NSF / AURA / W. O'Mullane) Are there anomalies ahead? What about Planet 9, which astronomers have been trying to detect on the edge of the solar system for more than 10 years? 'If it's out there, we have something like a 70 or 80% chance to find it,' Juric says. 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'A couple of days after that, on the 26th, we're going to have an extended version of that for the general public on the UW Seattle campus, at Kane Hall,' Juric says. 'We really invite everyone here from Seattle or the Pacific Northwest, however far you want to drive, to come over and see that with us in person.' The in-person event on June 26 will start at 7 p.m. and feature an hourlong presentation about Rubin's first images. Speakers will include Juric as well as UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, director of Rubin construction; and Andrew Connolly, who was the DiRAC Institute's founding director and is now the director of UW's eScience Institute. Juric expects the fun, and the hard work of discovery, to continue for at least the next decade. 'Rubin should have the kind of impact that when we look at textbooks 10 years from now, almost every textbook has to change something because Rubin has added to that piece of human knowledge,' he says. 'It's a fairly high bar to meet, but it is a big, expensive telescope. That's what we're aiming for: It's got to be transformational.' Check out the Rubin Observatory website for more information about the project and for links to the First Look webcast on June 23, plus a list of watch parties. You can also learn more about the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute and find out how to register for the free UW presentation at 7 p.m. on June 26. My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, Fiction Science is included in FeedSpot's 100 Best Sci-Fi Podcasts. Check out the original version of this report on Cosmic Log to get Juric's thoughts on the connections between science fiction and the Rubin Observatory's future discoveries. Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.
