Latest news with #VeraCRubinObservatory
Geek Wire
2 hours ago
- Science
- Geek Wire
The Rubin Observatory is throwing a big party to reveal its first pictures — and you're invited
After more than 20 years of planning and construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready for its grand opening, and the world is invited. The observatory in the foothills of the Chilean Andes features a monster of a telescope, with an 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror, coupled with what's said to be the world's largest digital camera. It will survey the night sky every night for at least 10 years, producing about 20 trillion bytes of data every 24 hours. It would take you more than three years of watching Netflix, or over 50 years of listening to Spotify, to use that amount of data, according to the Rubin team. The first images and videos are due to be unveiled on Monday, during a 'First Look' webcast that will be shared online and at more than 300 in-person watch parties across the globe. What will the images look like? Mario Juric knows, but he isn't telling. 'I cannot tell you what's on them, but I can tell you we just finished them, and they look amazing,' Juric, a member of the Rubin team and the director of the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, says on the Fiction Science podcast. 'I did not spend a day doing what I was supposed to be doing, because I just spent it browsing through the images. … I could teach an entire class by just zooming in on different parts of this image and explaining what this object is.' There could be a lot of teachable moments ahead: The observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope is expected to detect millions of previously unseen celestial bodies in our solar system, potentially including a hypothetical world known as Planet X or Planet 9. It'll serve as an early warning system for transient cosmic phenomena such as supernovas or gamma-ray bursts. And it could help scientists shed new light on the mysteries behind dark energy and dark matter. Mario Juric (UW Photo) The dark matter angle is particularly apt, because the observatory is named after the late Vera Rubin, an astronomer who analyzed the rotation rates of galaxies to come up with some of the most solid evidence we have that invisible dark matter exists. Even before Rubin died in 2016, her fellow scientists were laying the groundwork for the observatory that would eventually bear her name. In 2003, they started discussing potential sites for what was then called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. Juric recalls attending one of the early discussions in Seattle. At the time, astronomers were just finishing up a successful project known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 'People were asking, what do we build next? What's the next major step in this idea to go and digitize the cosmos?' Juric says. 'And the idea was to build something like Rubin.' In 2008, the project received a $30 million boost from Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi and the company's co-founder, Bill Gates. Eventually, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars to support the observatory's construction in Chile. Turning data into discoveries The observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope features a unique three-mirror design that maximizes the instrument's field of view. It's made to move across a swath of sky in just a few seconds, allowing the LSST Camera to capture a 3,200-megapixel image in 15 seconds and then switch to take the next image five seconds later. That speed makes it possible for the observatory to map the sky in high resolution every three days. It takes less than 60 seconds to transfer each image over fiber-optic cables from Chile to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California for an initial round of processing. The flood of imagery is distributed to data centers around the world, and scientists can access and filter the data through an online portal. Astronomical data analysis is the specialty of UW's DiRAC Institute. Its name is an acronym, standing for Data-intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology. Astronomers have traditionally been 'physicists who look up,' Juric says, but he argues that working with Rubin's rush of data will require a new set of skills — the kinds of skills that are being taught at the DiRAC Institute. 'You now need to become a data scientist, and you need to become a really good statistician,' he says. 'That's the kind of background that you're going to need to make sense out of all these data that Rubin is going to deliver to us.' A software tool that Juric helped develop, known as Sorcha, hints at the enormity of the task ahead. 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. 'Even if we don't directly notice it, my guess is in about three years or so, that's how much time it will take us to accumulate this data to sufficient precision [that] we'll confidently be able to say whether it is there and just really, really hard to find — or whether this whole thing has been just us astronomers hoping a little bit too much.' There's even a chance that the Rubin Observatory will pick up evidence of alien signals. Some astronomers, including UW's James Davenport, have speculated that Rubin could detect anomalous patterns that might be associated with extraterrestrial spaceships. 'The nice thing with this telescope is, we're going to collect so much data that we'll be able to go and look for these rare, unusual, anomalous signals. And who knows, maybe one of them is an E.T. shining a laser at us,' Juric says. 'It'll be fun.' The fun begins at 8 a.m. PT on Monday when the First Look webcast goes online. '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.
BBC News
3 days ago
- Science
- BBC News
World's largest digital camera about to release first photos
The first photos from the largest digital camera in the world are about to be revealed and we are expecting some out-of-this-world Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera was built to capture ground-breaking photos of week - on Monday, 23 June - some of these observations will be revealed to the world for the first time. According to the Guinness Book of Records the LSST is not only the largest digital camera, but also the one with the highest resolution which means it can take really detailed top-of-the-range phones have cameras with a resolution of up to 50 megapixels, whereas the LSST has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels!But you definitely can't carry this camera around with you, it's about the same size as a small car and weighs a massive 2, it is kept at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile attached to a powerful images it will take are so large that it would take 400 ultra-high-definition televisions to display one of them at full size. The camera aims to capture 1,000 images a night over the next 10 years and the project's mission is to catalogue 20 billion goal is to capture an ultra-wide and ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy say the images captured will help scientists answer questions about dark matter, the structure of the Milky Way and the formation of our Solar System."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."The first spectacular images are to be unveiled on 23 June at 11am in the US, which is 4pm in the 'First Look' event is set to be live-streamed on YouTube for any astronomy enthusiasts.
India Today
3 days ago
- Science
- India Today
World's largest digital camera is about to release its first pictures
A moment that could change the world of astronomy and our understanding of the cosmos is set to unfold as the Vera C Rubin Observatory, with the world's largest camera, unveils its first telescope, which has been over two decades in the making, is designed to create the ultimate movie of the night sky using the largest camera ever built, repeatedly scanning the sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the LSST Camera weighs around 3,000 kilograms, roughly the size of a small car, yet about twice as heavy. It boasts a staggering 3,200-megapixel sensor, equivalent to the combined resolution of 260 modern smartphone cameras. Rubin Observatory's engineering test camera, the Commissioning Camera (ComCam) was removed from the telescope in December 2024. (Photo: VCO) The camera's sheer imaging power is unprecedented: it would take hundreds of ultra-high-definition TV screens to display a single photograph captured by this to peer deep into the cosmos, the camera will enable scientists to observe billions of distant galaxies and faint, nearby objects that were previously beyond ensure the highest image quality, the camera's sensors are kept at an extremely cold temperature of -100C, minimising the number of defective pixels and ensuring the clarity of each shot. The device is also equipped with a sophisticated filter system, allowing it to switch between six massive colour filters — each 75 centimetres across — in under two filters, labelled u, g, r, i, z, and y, span wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared, granting the camera 'superhuman' vision and allowing astronomers to study the universe in unprecedented at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, the LSST Camera was shipped to Chile in May 2024 and is scheduled for installation on the Simonyi Survey Telescope in early 2025. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on a mountaintop in Chile, will revolutionise the way we explore the cosmos. (Photo: VCO) Once operational, the camera will work in tandem with the observatory's large mirrors, collecting and focusing cosmic light onto its powerful sensors. The resulting data will be transmitted worldwide for processing and capturing the sky in multiple colours over the next decade, the Rubin Observatory's camera will provide scientists with a treasure trove of information, helping to unravel mysteries about the universe's structure, evolution, and the nature of dark matter and dark anticipation builds for the camera's first images, the scientific community and the public alike await a new window into the cosmos. The pictures will be unveiled on June 23.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Coating satellites in ‘darkness' could help reduce light pollution
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission. Earth's satellite problem is only getting worse as time goes on and more satellites are sent into orbit. One of the chief issues with the number of satellites in orbit is how much they can affect our studies of the stars due to light pollution. However, astronomers may have come up with an ingenuous plan to paint satellites in literal darkness to help hide them from telescopes. The 'darkness' in question is an ultra-black paint called Vantablack 310. It's one of the darkest paints ever created, and it could help keep satellites from reflecting light back down toward Earth. Right now, when a satellite streaks across a telescope's view, it leaves behind a train that completely mar images. Today's Top Deals Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Ring Video Doorbell deals Memorial Day security camera deals: Reolink's unbeatable sale has prices from $29.98 Additionally, Starlink satellites sit so low in orbit that they are often much brighter than the stars astronomers are trying to study. However, Vantablack 310 could help cut down on that brightness by limiting how much light the satellites reflect to just 2%. That's a huge improvement that would virtually remove satellite streaks from telescope images. Considering we'll see the launch of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory later this year, finding a way to cut down on light pollution from satellites remains a key goal for astronomers. The problem with just coating satellites in typical Vantablack paint, though, is that it absorbs 99% of the light that hits it. This would quickly overheat the satellites painted with it, leading to other issues. That's not the case with Vantablack 310, though, which is being designed in conjunction with astronomers. The team says that it needed something that could be handled by engineers, and that's the goal with this new variation of the ultra-black paint. The company behind the new paint says that it should make satellites invisible to the naked eye. Whether or not we actually see the paint picked up by satellite makers is another issue altogether. SpaceX has experimented with similar options in the past, but they always suffered from the aforementioned overheating issues. Hopefully the idea of painting satellites in what equates to literal darkness will be enticing to satellite manufacturers, especially if we hope to keep exploring space and learning more about our universe's mysteries. More Top Deals Amazon gift card deals, offers & coupons 2025: Get $2,000+ free See the
The Independent
06-06-2025
- Science
- The Independent
Cosmic discovery could shed light on black holes in distant galaxies
Scientists have discovered extreme nuclear transients (ENTs), the most powerful energy blasts in the universe, occurring when stars are torn apart by supermassive black holes. ENTs can emit 100 times more energy in a year than the Sun does over its 10-billion-year lifetime. Astronomer Jason Hinkle identified the first two ENTs in data from the European Space Agency 's Gaia telescope. Researchers believe ENTs can be used to study massive black holes in distant galaxies, providing insights into black hole growth when the universe was half its current age. ENTs are rare, occurring much less frequently than supernovae, but upcoming observatories like the Vera C Rubin Observatory and Nasa 's Roman Space Telescope may help discover more of them.
