The Vera Rubin Observatory is about to completely transform astronomy

At the top of Cerro Pachón, a Chilean mountain which reaches more than 2,600 meters above sea level, the air is thin. I have to resume my breath while we go up the stairs inside the Dome of the Vera C. Rubin observatory. It is cool and calm and enormous, a bit like a cathedral – until the whole dome laughs in motion around us and opens onto the sky.

The night fell and above us, we sit more stars than I have never seen my own eyes. The Milky Way is shining more than usual, and I can simply distinguish two of its galactic neighbors, the young and old Magellanic clouds. However, the Rubin telescope can see far, much more. He is a giant: he holds world records for the largest digital camera and the biggest lens, and weighs 350 metric tonnes. It is a reflective telescope, bringing together light via mirrors, the largest of which is 8.4 meters in diameter – as wide as they could do because a tunnel on the top of the top has about 8.5 meters in diameter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2neujuof_g

However, despite such heft, this telescope can move extremely quickly – and this will revolutionize what we know about our own solar system, our galaxy and the universe. Every three nights, it will include an investigation into the southern sky. The previous surveys on All-Sky took months or weeks, but the rubin will make one in less than half a half, again and again for a decade.

“By taking the whole sky every three days, you can stack these images together to go further,” explains the scientist of the Kevin Reil observatory. “So, after 10 years, you have gone very, very deep, very, very far in the universe, very far in time. But you also get the structure of the universe,” he said. The result will be a kind of cosmic timelapse, which does not only capture change, but begins to reveal incredibly weak and distant objects as several images are combined to put them in sight.

Understanding the structure of the cosmos is one of the missions of the observatory – to know more precisely how the universe of dark matter. The Homonym of the Telescope, the astronomer Vera Rubin, started this trip. In the 1970s, his observations of galaxies turning clearly that visible matter made only fraction of the universe. She discovered that the stars on the outer edges of the galaxies moved too quickly – according to the laws of Kepler, they should have really been slower than the stars near the galactic centers.

After years of observations and calculations, the only square of square was to assume that there must be more material than we could see. This invisible thing has been named Dark Matter and astronomers now believe that there are about five times more in the cosmos than ordinary matter, and its gravitational traction shapes the universe that we see.

“The visible material actually follows where the dark matter is located, not the other way around,” explains Stephanie Deppe in the observatory. It is believed that the galaxies are arranged on what astronomers call the cosmic canvas, including filaments of interconnection of dark matter which trapped the stars that we can see, which themselves invent so-called stellar flows. Rubin’s images will give us our best look at this web.

Web mapping will also help us pin the true nature of dark matter. Is it warm and made of light and rapid or cold evolution and particles that are easily enlarged? “You can search for small disturbances such as folds in stellar flows,” explains Deppe. These will show us where tufts of dark matter have broken out through a filament. Understanding the size of a tuft to do so, the type of dark matter could be there. The structure of the cosmic canvas will also give us a better idea of ​​the effects of dark energy, the propulsive force accelerating the expansion of the universe.

The excitation on this precision astronomy is palpable at the observatory. During the night, I’m here for observations, everyone is a little dizzy. In the kitchen near the control room of the telescope, I hear excited chatter. One of the telescope operators almost bounced as he said: “I hope we get” on the sky “tonight.” It is the jargon of the observatory to open the shutter of the telescope and take images. “Oh, we will do it,” says his colleague, smiling in a cup of tea. When the sun sets, we cross all our fingers so that the clouds clean.

Once they do it, the control room is a hive of activity. The operators still work on the folds with the telescope, putting the images with appropriate orientation. Every 30 seconds, another arrives, with a Whooshing sound which indicates that the shutter opened, followed by another Whoosh when it closed. The telescope takes an instantaneous part of the sky, then closes towards the next place and takes another, building a grid that can be sewn together.

All is notorious until suddenly there is a problem. To get the most out of a telescope that can move so quickly, the observatory uses an automated program which chooses where to point the telescope then, depending on things like the weather or the moon phase. But for a while, this system does not work. The operators discuss with scientists from the base camp a few hours by car from the mountain. Together, they plunge into the code for the system to find the problem. The fix is ​​sent about 20 minutes later and they are running. The regular cadence of the WoiOSHING shutter starts again and the images continue to flow.

“This is one of the best nights we have had, it’s just cruise. These are such good data at the moment, ”explains Eli Rykoff, scientist of calibration. “I hope that people of treatment at the moment appreciate us that we give them high quality scientific images.”

Once the images made in the telescope, they start a long but very fast journey around the world. They descended the mountain along the first section of 103,000 kilometers of optical fiber cables which run either towards the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, then underwater in the United States. The images cross a hub in Florida, then find themselves at the National Slac Accelerator Laboratory in California.

Each image is around 32 gigapixels, which is about the size of a 4K film, and arrives in about 10 seconds, explains William O’Mullane, which manages the observatory data. From California, the data go to facilities in the United Kingdom and France which make the images available to scientists from around the world.

Perhaps the most urgent analysis will be done on rapid evolution objects. The Nocturnal Heaven Impulque, Blips and Changes in a way that we cannot always predict – and the Rubin Observatory is hot on its tail. We have never had the capacity to capture these movements so quickly, and this will allow us to see these objects changing in time as close to real time as possible. The telescope will follow the asteroids and the comets that take place in the sky, both those that constitute the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and those much more called trans-neptunian objects.

“Currently, we only know a few thousand objects” in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud that are beyond Neptune, “explains Deppe. “Rubin will increase the number of objects we know there.”

This will also help us to follow all the potential threats of almost land objects, increasing the known examples of these by around 30,000 to around 100,000. And we could even catch interstellar objects which quickly evolve like ‘Oumuamua, which crossed the solar system in 2017, or comet Borisov who stole in 2019.

This type of solar system census could also answer the question of whether there is a new planet. Encourageous evidence of such a world – one to 10 times the mass of the earth in the external solar system – come from objects of the Kuiper belt which have unusual but similar orbits. Simulations have shown that a planet could be blamed, but there is no direct proof.

It could soon change. “Either Rubin will find Planet Nine directly, he will find indisputable evidence, or this will completely destroy the evidence that exists,” explains Deppe.

A mystery that the telescope will not solve is the uncertain state of American science, which was emptied under the Trump administration. Rubin is funded jointly by the American Department of Energy and the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the latter, which saw its proposed budget reduced by more than half. When I asked the people of the observatory what it would mean for them, none was certain. “We will refuse to speculate on the potential impacts of the budget request for the president’s 2026 financial year,” said a spokesperson for the NSF when I asked later.

But back in the control room, funding is a concern for another day. We are approaching midnight, but the quarter of work is not close – scientists will take data up to 3 or 4 in the morning, but no one seems tired. From time to time, someone shouts something like: “Look at these beautiful images!”

The first images to be made public will be published on June 23, and in the meantime, the observatory will break full photos from the South sky every three nights. “The idea was, could you build an observatory that would take all the data that everyone would like?” Because if you take a photo of the whole sky every three days, and someone says: “I wanted a photo there”, wait three days, I will give you another, “explains Reil.

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