Latest news with #VeraCRubin
New York Times
20 hours ago
- Science
- New York Times
How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery
It was not that long ago that astronomers would spend a night looking through a telescope, making careful observations of one or a few points of light. Based on those few observations, they would extrapolate broad generalizations about the universe. 'It was all people could really do at the time, because it was hard to collect data,' said Leanne Guy, the data management scientist at the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Rubin, located in Chile and financed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, will inundate astronomers with data. Each image taken by Rubin's camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That's 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night. As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory's computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so. It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade. The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a '6' followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000. Rubin's 3.2 Gigapixel Camera At the heart of the Rubin observatory is the largest digital camera in the world, a supercooled grid with hundreds of high-resolution sensors. See how the camera works. By The New York Times PERU BOLIVIA BRAZIL ANDES MTS. PARAGUAY Vera C. Rubin Observatory URUGUAY Santiago ARGENTINA CHILE Atlantic Ocean Pacific Ocean By The New York Times Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Science
- New York Times
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.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
World's biggest camera will reveal its first-ever photos next week
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The world's biggest camera, capable of delivering 3200 megapixel image of the night sky, is about to show us its first-ever images. The camera, which is housed at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, is said to be able to see a golf ball from 15 miles away. On June 23 the first images from its ultra-definition sensor will be made public for the first time. This moment has been a long time coming. We started reporting on this monster camera back in 2019, when the giant lens for the camera, which measures 5 metres across, was being assembled at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in California. The camera will capture 1000 images a night over the next 10 years, with the project's mission being to catalog 20 billion galaxies. The First Look event at the observatory next week will unveil "of a set of large, ultra-high-definition images and videos that showcase Rubin's extraordinary capabilities to the world for the first time", we are told. "This will mark the beginning of a new era in astronomy and astrophysics". The event will be shown live on the Vera C Rubin Observatory's YouTube channel and on its website from 11am (Eastern Daylight Time) on Monday, June 23, 2025. Hundreds of venues around the world will also be hosting watch parties that include a public viewing of the live stream. Check out the Rubin First Look Watch Party website to find a location near you.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
A Game-Changing Telescope Is About to Drop First Pics. Here's How to Watch.
After more than 20 years in the making, we're finally about to see the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, an astronomical facility with the largest digital camera ever built by humans. On 23 June 2025, at 15:00 UTC (11:00 EDT), the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy will reveal the telescope's first observations, kicking off a whole new era in studying the skies. Perhaps the best part is, live watch parties will be taking place all over the world, and the entire event will be livestreamed on YouTube – you can tune in below. Rubin was first proposed in 2001, and is expected to do great things. The observatory telescope will perform a 10-year survey of the southern sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths, capturing the entire sky every few days to basically compile a huge timelapse of the Universe. Each section of the sky will be recorded around 800 times using the telescope's 3,200-megapixel camera. Every 24 hours, Rubin will generate about 20 terabytes of data. During the LSST, it's expected to collect some 60 petabytes of raw image data, around double the data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array during the same time frame. This incredible capacity requires cutting-edge data transfer, processing, and storage facilities in and of itself. Safe to say that astronomers are super hyped. We anticipate that Rubin is going to show us things about the Universe and answer questions that we haven't even begun to imagine. "Rubin's combination of speed, wide field of view, and sensitive camera expands the limits of what a telescope can do," the NSF and DOE assert. "No other telescope has been able to detect both real-time changes in the sky and faint or distant objects at the same time on this enormous scale. These capabilities mean that exceedingly rare events in the sky, never detected before, will be captured for the first time." You can tune into the event next week at the YouTube embed above, or check the Watch Party website to find an event near you. Trailblazing Satellite Mission Delivers Its First Artificial Solar Eclipse NASA Teams Up With India to Launch First-of-Its-Kind $1.5 Billion Satellite Volcano Found Hiding 'In Plain Sight' Right Next to NASA Mars Rover
