Atop a mountain in Chile, where the skies seem bigger and darker, sits the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a project of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The images it will capture over the next decade promise to change how we see ourselves in the cosmos.
All around the world on June 23, space fans tuned in to a livestream to get their first look at Rubin’s images. In Durham, N.C., cosmologists gathered at Duke University’s Brooks Field at Wallace Wade Stadium in anticipation. For some, it marked the culmination of many years’ work.
Over the next 10 years, the Rubin Observatory will scan the sky for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), taking pictures of every celestial object in its view about 800 times. The result will be a time lapse that shows how stars and galaxies move and change, and an amount of data about the universe that is unprecedented.
Seeing Stars
The observatory is going to begin its LSST project some time in October, according to Chris Walter, professor of physics at Duke. Once it begins, the images will be released to the public after a two-year proprietary period, when only scientists will be able to access the data.
Until then, the Rubin Observatory’s first capture – the images seen by the worldwide audience on June 23 – can be seen and explored through their Sky Viewer page, which is navigable by computer or touchscreen.
Arun Kannawadi, an assistant research professor in the Department of Physics at Duke, has been involved with the Rubin Observatory for over a decade. The images the world saw this week weren’t new to him.
Still, the awe in his voice was unmistakable.
“And pretty much every other colored object here you see is a galaxy,” he said, while looking at images taken by Rubin on a laptop. “So like, this little speck of light is its own galaxy. This one is and, like, there's just millions and millions and millions of galaxies right here.”
Vera C. Rubin Observatory By the Numbers
- The camera in the Rubin Observatory is the largest one to ever be built. It’s the size of a car, but weighs more than one. To see an image that it captures would require you to look at 400 ultra-high-definition TVs all at once – that’s how big it is.
- Each night, the observatory will produce 20 terabytes worth of data. After 10 years of operation, the Rubin Observatory will have produced 60 petabytes – more data than the sum of everything that has ever been written in human language, ever.
- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the first US national observatory to be named after a woman.
Shedding Light on the Dark Side
The Observatory’s namesake, Vera C. Rubin, was a pioneering astronomer who first found evidence for dark matter. Today, her mission lives on in a new generation of cosmologists at Duke University.
Dark matter and dark energy are little-understood parts of the universe, yet it makes up most of it. It’s 95% of the “stuff” that’s out there. It interacts with gravity like the matter that makes up all the items around you, except it’s invisible. Hence why it’s “dark.”
Erik Peterson is a Duke postdoc at the Cosmology Group who uses exploding stars–type 1A supernovae– to measure dark energy and learn about the expansion of the universe.
Until now, Peterson was studying just a sample of 2,000 supernovae.
“And this is going to observe like millions of them, and so we're going to just get unbelievable statistics to be able to really detect or test the limits of our understanding of dark energy,” he said.
