During its brief perusal of the night sky, Rubin even managed to spy more than 2,000 never-before-seen asteroids, demonstrating that it should be able to spotlight even the sneakiest denizens, and darkest corners, of our own solar system.
NSF-DOE VERA C. RUBIN OBSERVATORY
Today’s reveal is a mere amuse-bouche compared with what’s to come: Rubin, funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, is set for at least 10 years of planned observations. But this moment, and these glorious inaugural images, are worth celebrating for what they represent: the culmination of over a decade of painstaking work.
“This is a direct demonstration that Rubin is no longer in the future,” says Bernardinelli. “It’s the present.”
The observatory is named after the late Vera Rubin, an astronomer who uncovered strong evidence for dark matter, a mysterious and as-yet-undetected something that’s binding galaxies together more strongly than the gravity of ordinary, visible matter alone can explain. Trying to make sense of dark matter—and its equally mysterious, universe-stretching cousin, dubbed dark energy—is a monumental task, one that cannot be addressed by just one line of study or scrutiny of one type of cosmic object.
That’s why Rubin was designed to document anything and everything that shifts or sparkles in the night sky. Sitting atop Chile’s Cerro Pachón mountain range, it boasts a 7,000-pound, 3,200-megapixel digital camera that can take detailed snapshots of a large patch of the night sky; a house-size cradle of mirrors that can drink up extremely distant and faint starlight; and a maze of joints and pistons that allow it to swivel about with incredible speed and precision. A multinational computer network permits its sky surveys to be largely automated, its images speedily processed, any new objects easily detected, and the relevant groups of astronomers quickly alerted.
#stunning #images #Vera #Rubin #Observatory
