In this immense image, NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a brand new view of two old friends: the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. The image provides a demonstration of what makes Rubin unique: its combination of an extremely wide field of view and the speed that allows it to take lots of big images in a very short time. (LSST via SWNS)
By Dean Murray
The world’s largest digital camera has revealed its first images.
The size of a small car, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera weighs nearly 2,800 kilograms and boasts an extraordinary 3,200-megapixel resolution.
Located at the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory atop the Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile, the camera has already captured millions of galaxies and stars in the Milky Way, as well as thousands of asteroids in just over 10 hours of initial test observations.
This image, one of the first released by Rubin Observatory, exposes a Universe teeming with stars and galaxies, transforming seemingly empty, inky-black pockets of space into glittering tapestries for the first time. Here, Rubin’s view is focused on the southern region of the Virgo Cluster, about 55 million light-years away from Earth and the nearest large collection of galaxies to our own Milky Way. (LSST via SWNS)
The images offer a preview of the observatory’s ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which aims to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the Universe by scanning the sky nightly.
Each image from the LSST Camera covers an area as large as 45 full Moons and is so detailed that displaying one at full scale would require 400 ultra-high-definition televisions.
This annotated first look image of the Virgo Cluster was captured by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. From sizable stars to sprawling galaxies, Rubin transforms seemingly empty pockets of space into glittering tapestries. (LSST via SWNS)
Over the next decade, the observatory is expected to catalog around 20 billion galaxies and discover millions of new asteroids, dramatically expanding our understanding of the cosmos.
The unprecedented data gathered will help scientists investigate some of the Universe’s most profound mysteries, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the structure of the Milky Way, and the evolution of our Solar System.
During its ten-year survey, Rubin will generate approximately 20 terabytes of data per night, plus an additional 15 petabytes of catalog database. In 10 years, Rubin data processing will generate around 500 petabytes, and the final dataset will contain billions of objects with trillions of measurements.