An $800 million car-sized camera captures the universe like never before

The first priority for the Rubin Observatory’s cameras will be completing a 10-year review of the sky

La Serena, Chile:

Surrounded by desert mountains and clear blue skies in northern Chile, astronomers at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory hope to revolutionize the study of the universe by mounting the world’s largest digital camera on a telescope.

Officials on the US-funded project told AFP that the sophisticated device, which is about the size of a small car and weighs 2.8 tons, will reveal the cosmic landscape like never before.

Starting in early 2025, the $800 million camera will take its first pictures, and the machine will scan the sky every three days, allowing scientists to reach new heights in galactic analysis.

Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Astronomical Society (Sochias), said researchers will be able to go from “studying one star and learning everything about that star to studying thousands of stars at once.”

Stuartt Corder, deputy director of the US research center NOIRLab, said the observatory, located 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) above Cerro Pachon, 560 kilometers (350 miles) north of Santiago, would usher in a “paradigm shift” in astronomy with the new facility. “

Sochias said the project cemented Chile’s dominance in astronomical observation, as the South American country has one-third of the world’s most powerful telescopes and has one of the clearest skies on Earth.

The first priority for the Rubin Observatory’s cameras is to complete a 10-year review of the sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), an effort that researchers hope will reveal insights about 20 million galaxies, 17 billion stars and 6 million objects in space. Object information.

This survey will provide scientists with the latest inventory of solar system images, allowing them to map our own galaxy (the Milky Way) and study energy and dark matter in greater depth.

One photo requires 300 TVs

The new camera will be able to take 3,200-megapixel photos, producing images so large that more than 300 average-sized HDTVs would need to be lined up side by side to view even one.

Made in California, the machine has three times the capacity of the world’s most powerful camera currently, Japan’s 870-megapixel Hyper Suprime-Cam, and six times the capacity of NOIRLab’s most powerful camera.

Jacques Sebag, the person in charge of building the Rubin Telescope, said the lab’s existing top-mounted camera on Mount Tololo in Chile only has 520 megapixels.

Telescopes in Chile have come a long way since the installation of the 40-centimeter Monte Tololo Telescope in the 1960s, Chile’s first international observatory.

“That telescope got here on the back of a mule because there were no roads,” said Stephen Heathcote, director of the Inter-American Observatory at Monte Tololo, just 20 kilometers from Passon.

Astronomy capital of the world

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named in honor of the American astronomer who discovered dark matter, will join several other space observation research centers in northern Chile.

The natural conditions of the region’s desert landscape, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, create some of the clearest skies on Earth due to a dry climate with few clouds.

The region is home to telescopes from more than 30 countries, including some of the world’s most powerful astronomical instruments, such as the ALMA Observatory’s radio telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope under construction, expected to be able to observe never-before-seen extents of the universe by 2027 .

Many of humanity’s most important astronomical discoveries were made at the Mount Toloro Observatory, such as the 2011 Nobel Prize winner’s revelation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon known as cosmic acceleration.

Diaz, president of Sochias, said that while there are other influential observatories opening around the world, including the United States, Australia, China and Spain, “Chile is unparalleled in the field of astronomy.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)