On a mountain ridge 2,700m above sea level is the new home to one of astronomy’s most important new facilities, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Six months from now, the largest camera ever built for astronomy will start snapping images of the sky from a mountaintop in Chile. "It’s going to image the whole southern sky once every three to four nights, taking around 800 30-second exposures per night," says Sandrine Thomas, deputy director for Rubin construction for AURA, which operates and builds observatories on behalf of the US National Science Foundation.
That camera is part of The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a project looking to answer some of science’s big questions, like, “how did the Milky Way form?” Or, “what exactly are dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe?” In addition to these two areas of study, the survey will also create an inventory of the solar system and observe what are called “transients,” objects such as solar system bodies or supernovae that move across the sky or change brightness.
The camera has taken a decade to build at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, California. It’s about the size of a car and cost $168 million, funded by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Astronomers across the globe will be able to access the Observatory’s data on an online portal, the first time, its website says, that “this much astronomical data will be available to so many people.” It’s a rather large pile of it - the Observatory will produce 20 terabytes of data every night, double the entire printed collection of the United States Library of Congress.