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Surrounded by the desert mountains and clear blue skies of northern Chile, astronomers at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory hope to revolutionize the study of the universe by placing the world’s largest digital camera on a telescope.
The size of a small car and weighing 2.8 tons, this sophisticated equipment will reveal views of the cosmos like never before, officials behind the US-funded project told AFP.
Starting in early 2025, when the $800 million camera takes its first photographs, the machine will sweep the sky every three days, allowing scientists to reach new heights in their galactic analyses.
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Researchers will be able to go from “studying a star and knowing everything in depth about that star, to studying thousands of stars at the same time,” said Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Astronomy Society (Sochias).
According to Stuartt Corder, deputy director of NOIRLab, the American research center that runs the observatory located 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) high on Cerro Pachón, 560 kilometers (350 miles) north of Santiago, the new facility will mark the beginning of “a paradigm shift.” in astronomy.”
The project solidifies Chile’s dominant position in astronomical observation, as the South American country is home to a third of the most powerful telescopes in the world, according to Sochias, and has one of the clearest skies on the planet.
The Rubin Observatory camera’s first task will be to complete a 10-year survey of the sky, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which researchers hope will reveal information about 20 million galaxies, 17 billion stars and six millions of space objects. .
The study will provide scientists with an updated inventory of images of the solar system, allow them to map our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and delve deeper into the study of energy and dark matter.
– 300 televisions for one image –
The new camera will be able to capture 3,200-megapixel photos, resulting in images so large that it would take more than 300 average-sized HDTVs, lined up together, to view just one.
The machine, built in California, will have three times the capacity of the most powerful camera in the world today, Japan’s 870-megapixel Hyper Suprime-Cam, and will have six times the capacity of NOIRLab’s most powerful camera.
The existing upper camera in the laboratory, on Chile’s Cerro Tololo mountain, has only 520 megapixels, according to Jacques Sebag, head of construction for the Rubin telescope.
Chile’s telescopes have come a long way since the 40-centimeter Cerro Tololo telescope, the country’s first international observatory, installed in the 1960s.
“That telescope arrived here on the back of a mule, because there was no road,” said Stephen Heathcote, director of the Inter-American Observatory at Cerro Tololo, just 20 kilometers from Cerro Pachón.
– World capital of astronomy –
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named after 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, hidden between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, create the clearest skies on the planet, thanks to a dry climate with little cloud cover.
The area is home to telescopes from more than 30 countries, including some of the most powerful astronomical instruments in the world, such as the ALMA Observatory radio telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope, under construction, which in 2027 will be able to see never-before-seen reaches of the universe.
Many of humanity’s most important astronomical discoveries have been made at the Cerro Tololo observatory, such as the 2011 Nobel Prize-winning revelation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon known as cosmic acceleration.
Although other influential observatories have opened around the world, including the United States, Australia, China and Spain, “Chile is unbeatable” in the world of astronomy, said Dias, president of Sochias.