The Vera C Rubin Observatory is about to show us the universe like never before

Australia Broadcast Center

21-06-2025

The Vera C Rubin Observatory is about to open its eyes.
Perched on a Chilean mountaintop, the US-funded observatory promises to "revolutionise our view of the cosmos".
Using the world's largest digital camera, the observatory will take images of the Southern Hemisphere over the next 10 years.
After a decade under construction, which cost $US810 million ($1.2 billion) alone, it is about to release its first snapshots to the public early in the week.
Australia is one of many countries contributing to the telescope's development, and astronomers such as Tania Barone from Swinburne University of Technology are gearing up for the wealth of information the observatory is expected to generate.
The Rubin Observatory, or officially the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, is built on the Chilean mountain of Cerro Pachón, 2,647 metres above sea level.
The high altitude and dry air gives it a view of the night sky with minimal interference.
Inside, a telescope with an 8.4 metre-wide mirror will feed light into a camera the size of a car.
The 3,000-kilogram camera is the largest digital camera ever made, and each exposure will capture an area of the night sky about 45 times the area of the full moon.
The camera will use six different coloured filters to take images in different light spectra from ultraviolet beyond our vision, right through to infrared.
When combined, these filters will provide a spectacularly detailed view of the cosmos over time.
The camera will snap a picture every few seconds, and will be able to photograph the whole Southern Hemisphere sky every couple of days.
It is scheduled to do this for 10 years, building up a decade-long survey of space and how it changes.
But Dr Barone said that the observatory will also be able to provide astronomers with super-fast results.
"Every time it looks at the same patch of sky, it will immediately compare it to what it looked like before," Dr Barone said.
"If there's a change, it sends out alerts, and suddenly everyone can follow it up and see what's happening."
The observatory is named after the US astronomer Vera Rubin, who uncovered some of the first evidence for dark matter.
The observatory was born out of a quest by astronomers to solve the mystery of dark matter.
Researchers started floating the idea for the observatory in the 1990s, discussing what type of telescope they would need to learn more about dark matter and how powerful it would need to be.
The observatory will be useful for understanding dark matter, but it will also be able to spot a number of other things.
Rachel Webster, an astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne, said that the telescope's ability to capture the whole night sky, several times a week, will allow researchers to view rare objects that were previously only captured by chance.
These include stars that explode as supernovas, or quasars that send out regular pulses of energy across the universe like clockwork.
"I've got experiments that I designed and thought about 30 years ago which I had never been able to do," Professor Webster said.
A particular area of interest is gravitational lensing: where the gravity of objects can warp and magnify light coming from more distant objects.
"We're going to be able to find a whole lot more of these incredible targets, which tell us a whole lot about, dark matter, the nature of the universe, and also the nature of these really distant galaxies because they are very brightly magnified," Dr Barone said.
The telescope's huge lens will also capture very faint light, allowing researchers to see distant large-scale objects.
"We haven't been able to really do that before, because telescopes tend to have fairly small scales," Professor Webster said.
Jonti Horner, an astrophysicist at the University of Southern Queensland, said the telescope would also be able to spot much closer objects.
The observatory will be able to spot many more asteroids, comets, and other close Solar System objects than any previous telescope.
Professor Horner said that the observatory will also give people a much better chance of seeing asteroids that could crash into the Earth.
"If we find something that's on a collision course, it gives us hugely more time to see that it's coming, giving us the option to do something about it — whether that's deflecting the object or evacuating the area," he said.
Earlier this year, NASA spotted an asteroid, dubbed 2024 YR4, that had a higher-than-usual chance of hitting the Earth within seven years. Experts now think it poses no significant risk.
"If Vera Rubin was operating 10 years ago, we would have found that object 10 years ago," Professor Horner said.
The observatory will also be useful for finding out if the the elusive Planet Nine, a theoretical gigantic planet beyond Neptune, actually exists.
The Rubin Observatory's first pictures will be released early this week.
The official unveiling happens at 1am (AEST) this Tuesday, June 24.
If you are keen, you can watch the unveiling live on the telescope's website or rug up and go to a watch party in Melbourne, Sydney or Perth.
The telescope's official mission will begin a little later this year, and researchers anticipate it will not be long before they see exciting information coming out of the observatory.
Australian researchers have arranged to get access to Rubin's information, by helping to process Rubin's information.
The observatory will be generating some 20 terabytes of data every night.
"The volume of data that will come off is beyond even the resources of the US," Professor Webster said.
Australian researchers have developed software that the observatory will run on, helping to process these vast torrents of data.
"We found that the most efficient or effective way that we contribute was to offer our brains," Professor Webster said.
"So we've had a number of IT people who've been working on the data processing."
In return, the Australian astronomy community has negotiated to get access to Rubin's information as soon as it is generated, allowing them to progress their research further.
"It was really impressive to see astronomers who come from totally different research fields with totally different research interests, all saying 'this is really important to us, we need to have access,'" Professor Horner said.