[By Observer.com Chen Sijia] On June 23 local time, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory located in Chile released its first set of images. During about 10 hours of test observations, the Rubin Observatory captured millions of galaxies and stars, as well as thousands of asteroids, and discovered 2104 previously unobserved asteroids in the solar system.
This $800 million observatory is jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science, and is located on the Pachon Ridge in Chile. The observatory is named after the late American astronomer Vera C. Rubin, a pioneer in the study of galaxy rotation curves and who made significant contributions to dark matter research. The observatory is expected to be fully operational later this year.
"The new telescope is expected to discover hundreds of billions of asteroids, galaxies, and stars," the Economist magazine said on the 23rd. After the completion of the Rubin Observatory, it will launch a ten-year "Legacy Survey of Space and Time" (LSST) project, taking high-resolution images of the southern sky. This observatory can collect trillions of data points from hundreds of billions of celestial bodies at an extremely fast speed, which could revolutionize astronomy.
Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile - Rubin Observatory website
The telescope at the Rubin Observatory uses a unique three-mirror design. After light from the sky reaches the telescope, it first hits the primary mirror with a diameter of 8.4 meters, then reflects to the secondary mirror with a diameter of 3.4 meters, and finally returns to the tertiary mirror with a diameter of 4.8 meters, focusing on the LSST camera of the observatory. Experts from the University of Arizona spent seven years to complete the polishing of the primary mirror.
The LSST camera used by the Rubin Observatory is the largest digital camera in the world, measuring 1.7 meters in length and weighing 2.8 tons, with a resolution of up to 3.2 billion pixels. The camera has a wide field of view, equivalent to 45 times the area of a full moon.
Although the telescope and camera are very large, the giant dome that houses these devices can move quickly, and the telescope can take an image every 30 seconds. The Rubin Observatory also developed an advanced software processing system, using machine learning algorithms to automatically calculate the direction of the camera, avoiding obstacles such as clouds and satellites while covering as much of the sky as possible.
The Economist stated that the data from the Rubin Observatory will be transmitted through dedicated fiber optics to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, USA, and backup data will be transmitted to data centers in France and the UK. SLAC's computers will use automated programs to perform preliminary analysis of the images, identifying celestial bodies whose positions or brightness have changed significantly, and then using specialized algorithms to create a priority list, sending it to observatories around the world.
The Rubin Observatory estimates that after the LSST project officially starts, the amount of data collected by the observatory in the first year will exceed the total data collected by all other optical observatories. The observatory will collect approximately 20TB of data each night, and during the ten-year mission, data processing will generate about 500PB of data, with the final dataset containing billions of objects and trillions of measurements.
The first images released by the Rubin Observatory on the 23rd have already demonstrated its powerful observational capabilities. For example, one image was composed of 678 individual images taken over seven hours, clearly revealing the gas and dust clouds of the Orion Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula, both of which are thousands of light-years away from Earth.
This image shows the gas and dust clouds of the Orion Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula - Rubin Observatory website
Details of the open star cluster Messier 21, the Orion Nebula (Messier 20), the open star cluster Bochum 14, and the globular cluster NGC 6544 revealed in the image - Rubin Observatory website
Another cosmic image was made from more than 1,100 individual images and contains about 10 million galaxies, which the Rubin Observatory has named "The Cosmic Treasure Chest." The Rubin Observatory estimates that within the next decade, they expect to capture about 2 billion galaxies.
This "Cosmic Treasure Chest" image captures about 10 million galaxies - Rubin Observatory website
Details shown after zooming in on a part of the image - Rubin Observatory website
The Rubin Observatory also stated in a statement that astronomers discovered 2104 previously unobserved asteroids in the solar system during the 10-hour test observation, including seven near-Earth asteroids.
The Economist magazine pointed out that during the ten-year mission, the LSST camera will observe the same location in the sky multiple times, allowing astronomers to continuously combine images of the same area. Distant, ancient celestial bodies may be very faint, but by stacking thousands of images, astronomers may be able to find some of the oldest galaxies and stars.
By observing details such as the color, shape, position, and motion of over 17 billion stars and 200 billion galaxies, the Rubin Observatory also has the potential to create a star catalog, helping astronomers build a more detailed picture of the early universe and study the evolution of the universe. This is crucial for two key tasks of the Rubin Observatory: studying the properties of dark matter and dark energy.
American astronomer Vera C. Rubin was a pioneer in the study of galaxy rotation curves. Starting in the 1970s, Rubin and her colleagues observed the rotation curves of spiral galaxies like the Andromeda galaxy, discovering that the rotational speed of stars at the periphery of galaxies is almost the same as that of stars near the center.
According to Newtonian gravity, if the region where matter exists in a galaxy is the luminous region, the speed should decrease with distance from the center. However, the actual observations did not show this, meaning that in these galaxies, there is a large amount of invisible matter beyond the visible stars and gas. Rubin's research provided important evidence for the existence of dark matter.
Since the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe at the end of the 20th century, the scientific community realized that traditional gravitational theory and ordinary matter components could not explain this phenomenon, so they introduced a new and mysterious cosmic component called dark energy. According to cosmological observations, scientists estimate that currently, dark energy accounts for 68% of the matter or energy in the universe, dark matter accounts for 27%, and ordinary matter only accounts for about 5%.
The LSST project of the Rubin Observatory is expected to start in October this year. Aaron Roodman, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States, said: "The Rubin Observatory allows us to explore galaxies, stars in the Milky Way, and celestial bodies in the solar system in a completely new way. Since we can quickly and frequently photograph the sky, it detects millions of changing celestial bodies almost every night."
Roodman believes that this observatory has great potential to help scientists investigate dark energy and study how the universe is expanding rapidly.
Physicist Leanne Guy from the Rubin Observatory said: "Many rapid or transient celestial bodies can only be observed by large observatories when they happen to point in the right direction at the right time. Now, we still haven't really had a complete, broad, and deep understanding of the universe... In the long run, I am most excited to see what the Rubin Observatory can do that we have never thought of before."
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