World’s largest digital camera set to transform our understanding of the universe

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, has released a series of extraordinary images, which show millions of galaxies, stars in the Milky Way and thousands of asteroids, all in unprecedented detail. 

These images, captured in just 10 hours of observations, offer a glimpse of what’s to come from Rubin’s forthcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – a 10-year mission to build the most detailed time-lapse map of the night sky ever attempted.

The UK is playing a major role in the
global collaboration, as the second-largest international contributor to the project, supported by a £23 million investment from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

The UK will host one of three international data facilities to support management and processing of the unprecedented amounts of data that Rubin will produce.

Among the UK scientists closely involved is Professor Chris Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester. 

“These images are spectacular and show a few major things,” said Professor Chris Conselice.

“They show
how deep and how high resolution the data for the Rubin surveys will be over vast areas of the sky. 

“It also shows that nearly all galaxies have outer diffuse light, which is something we know little about and shows how much is to be discovered. 

“Rubin will allow us to study this light in detail, greatly advancing our understanding of the histories of galaxies, information of which is contained within this light, including merger activity and formation of the first galaxies.”
 
The images
have been taken with the LSST Camera – the world’s newest and most powerful survey telescope, equipped with the largest digital camera ever built and feeds a powerful data processing system.

Over the next decade, it will repeatedly scan the sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our universe that will bring the sky to life with a treasure trove of billions of scientific discoveries. 

The images will reveal asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, supernova explosions, far-off galaxies and perhaps cosmic phenomena
that no one has seen before.

Already, the camera has identified more than 2,000 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System.

The project will generate the largest dataset in the history of optical astronomy. The amount of data gathered by Rubin Observatory in its first year alone will be greater than that collected by all other optical observatories combined.

The dataset is expected to reach around 500 petabytes and catalogue billions of cosmic objects with trillions of measurements that will help scientists make countless discoveries about the universe and will serve as an incomparable resource for scientific exploration for decades to come.