WHO
US Division of Power’s SLAC Nationwide Accelerator Laboratory, US Nationwide Science Basis
WHEN
6 months
The subsequent time you look up on the evening sky, contemplate: The particles inside every thing you’ll be able to see make up solely about 5% of what’s on the market within the universe. Darkish vitality and darkish matter represent the remainder, astronomers consider—however what precisely is this mysterious stuff?
A large new telescope erected in Chile will discover this query and different cosmic unknowns. It’s named for Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who within the Seventies and Eighties noticed stars shifting quicker than anticipated within the outer reaches of dozens of spiral galaxies. Her calculations made a powerful case for the existence of darkish matter—mass we will’t straight observe however that seems to form every thing from the paths of stars to the construction of the universe itself.
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Quickly, her namesake observatory will stick with it that work in a lot increased definition. The power, run by the SLAC Nationwide Accelerator Laboratory and the US Nationwide Science Basis, will home the most important digital digital camera ever made for astronomy. And its first mission shall be to finish what’s known as the Legacy Survey of Area and Time. Astronomers will focus its large lens on the sky over the Southern Hemisphere and snap picture after picture, passing over the identical patches of sky repeatedly for a decade.
By the top of the survey, this 3.2-gigapixel digital camera can have catalogued 20 billion galaxies and picked up as much as 60 petabytes of knowledge—roughly thrice the quantity at the moment saved by the US Library of Congress. Compiling all these photographs collectively, with assist from specialised algorithms and a supercomputer, will give astronomers a time-lapse view of the sky. Seeing how so many galaxies are dispersed and formed will allow them to review darkish matter’s gravitational impact. In addition they plan to create probably the most detailed three-dimensional map of our Milky Approach galaxy ever made.
If all goes properly, the telescope will snap its first science-quality photographs—a particular second often known as first mild—in mid-2025. The general public might see the primary picture launched from Rubin quickly after.
