More questions about the Universe, including dark matter and dark energy, will soon be answered following the completion of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This will also set Chile as a top destination for observational astronomy.
What Is Vera C. Rubin Observatory From Chile?
Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a state-of-the-art telescope connected to the world's largest camera. The $19 billion observatory located in the desert region of Coquimbo, Chile, took nine years to be completed. It has a large digital camera and a swiftly moving telescope to capture the dim light of drifting stars in galaxy clusters.
It can identify 10 million occurrences per night, from supernova explosions to asteroid movement. The main goal of the research is to solve the mysteries surrounding dark matter and dark energy, which account for more than 70% of the universe.
"It's a very rich dataset, it has something for almost everybody in astronomy," said Frossie Economou, the site's technical manager for data management. "We'll answer questions about the universe from our local neighbourhood - the solar system - to the creation of time, out there in the far reaches."
A whopping 60 petabytes (60,000,000 gigabytes) of data will be produced by the 10-year Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) through 2 million photographs. Approximately 25% of this data is processed in the UK.
The coordinator of Rubin's foreign programs, Aprajita Verma, is stationed at the University of Oxford. The LSST is "the greatest movie of the sky that mankind has ever made," according to her.
Verma believes the potential impact of LSST to transform survey astronomy and their comprehension of the billions of objects they will see.
Steve Heathcote, the director of Cerro Tololo, a neighboring observatory that conducted studies that serve as a precursor for Rubin, is hopeful that the new observatory will find new things that could challenge Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and fundamental things in physics.
What Will Vera C. Rubin Observatory Do?
Rubin will use the world's largest digital camera to scan the entire southern hemisphere sky every few nights for 10 years. This will reveal intracluster light, which astronomers have mostly only been able to detect up until now with lengthy, focused surveys of one galaxy cluster at a time.
Rubin will take millions of high-resolution photos of far-off galaxy clusters over its decade-long survey. Scientists will be able to stack these photos to generate the greatest ultra-long-exposure panoramas of the southern hemisphere sky ever produced.
Astronomers will also be able to examine more galaxy clusters with discernible intracluster light in each field of view thanks to the stacked photos that they have up until now.
In this approach, Rubin will enable scientists like Mireia Montes, a research fellow at Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and member of the Rubin/LSST Galaxies Science Collaboration, to examine the faint glow of intracluster light throughout the universe by increasing the number of galaxy clusters they can study from a small number to thousands.
Important hints concerning the origins of the large-scale structure of the universe can be found in intracluster light, ranging from the evolution of galaxy clusters to the distribution of dark matter. According to Montes, intracluster light may appear to be very small and insignificant, but it has a lot of implications. It will open new windows into the history of our universe and complement what we already know.
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