Astronomers in Chile to scour universe with car-sized mega camera

Surrounded by the desert mountains and clear blue sky of northern Chile, astronomers from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory hope to revolutionize the examine of the universe by affixing the world’s largest-ever digital digicam to a telescope.

The scale of a small automobile and weighing 2.8 metric tons, the subtle piece of apparatus will reveal views of the cosmos as by no means earlier than, officers from the US-funded challenge instructed AFP.

Starting in early 2025, when the $800 million digicam will snap its first pictures, the machine will sweep the sky each three days, permitting scientists to achieve new heights of their galactic analyses.

Researchers will have the ability to go from “finding out one star and realizing every little thing in-depth about that one star, to finding out hundreds of stars at a time,” mentioned Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Society of Astronomy (Sochias).

In keeping with Stuartt Corder, deputy director of NOIRLab, the US analysis middle working the observatory situated 2,500 meters (8,200 ft) up the Cerro Pachon mountain, 560 kilometers (350 miles) north of Santiago, the brand new facility will usher in “a paradigm shift in astronomy.”

The challenge solidifies Chile’s dominant place in astronomical statement, because the South American nation is house to a 3rd of the globe’s strongest telescopes, in keeping with Sochias, and boasts among the many clearest skies on the planet.

The Rubin Observatory digicam’s first activity will probably be to finish a 10-year evaluate of the sky, referred to as the Legacy Survey of House and Time (LSST), which researchers hope will reveal details about 20 million galaxies, 17 billion stars and 6 million space objects.

The survey will give scientists an up-to-date stock of photographs of the solar system, enable them to map our personal galaxy, the Milky Way, and delve deeper into the examine of power and dark matter.

300 TVs for one image

The brand new digicam will have the ability to seize 3,200-megapixel pictures—leading to photographs so massive they might require greater than 300 average-size high-definition televisions, lined up collectively, to view only one.

The machine, in-built California, could have triple the capability of the world’s present strongest digicam, the 870-megapixel Hyper Suprime-Cam in Japan, and could have six occasions the capability of NOIRLab’s strongest digicam.

The lab’s current prime digicam, on Chile’s Cerro Tololo mountain, is simply 520 megapixels, in keeping with Jacques Sebag, head of building of the Rubin telescope.

Chile’s telescopes have come a good distance for the reason that 40-centimeter Cerro Tololo telescope, on the nation’s first worldwide observatory, put in within the Nineteen Sixties.

“That telescope arrived right here on the again of a mule, as a result of there was no street,” mentioned Stephen Heathcote, director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, solely 20 kilometers from Cerro Pachon.

Astronomy capital of the world

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named in honor of the US astronomer who found dark matter, will be part of a number of different space statement analysis facilities in northern Chile.

The pure situations of the area’s desert panorama—tucked between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountain vary—create the clearest skies on the planet, due to a dry local weather with little cloud cowl.

The realm performs host to telescopes from greater than 30 international locations, together with a number of the strongest astronomical devices on the planet, such because the radio telescope on the ALMA Observatory and the under-construction Extraordinarily Massive Telescope, which by 2027 is about to have the ability to view never-before-seen reaches of the universe.

A lot of humanity’s most essential astronomical discoveries have been made on the Cerro Tololo observatory, such because the 2011 Nobel Prize-winning revelation that the growth of the universe is selecting up velocity, a phenomenon referred to as cosmic acceleration.

Although different influential observatories have been opened across the globe, together with in the USA, Australia, China and Spain, “Chile is unbeatable” on the planet of astronomy, mentioned Dias, the Sochias president.

© 2024 AFP