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Telescope built in the Bay Area captures photos of space like never before
The first images of the universe from the world's largest digital camera were released on Monday. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park unveiled the never-before-seen images of our universe.
The Rubin Observatory sits on the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile with the digital camera scanning the sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high definition timelapse of our universe
Phil Marshall is passionate about uncovering the secrets to our incredible universe. He is the Deputy Director of Operations at Rubin Observatory.
Marshall has been waiting for years to see the very first images from Rubin Observatory's digital camera, capturing the cosmos in a way unlike anything else.
"I think I described it as a dream come true," said Marshall. "I've been thinking about this for so long. It's kind of amazing that it's here now. On the other hand, this is just the beginning. It's very exciting to be at the start of the survey, just about able to do all the investigations of the universe that we've been planning for so long.
These sharper, clearer images of our universe are like nothing we've seen before with millions of galaxies in each snapshot in amazing detail.
"Honestly, it's just mind-blowing," said Risa Wechsler, Stanford & SLAC Director of Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. "It makes me very, very excited about the future of astrophysics. Previously, we've been able to see a lot of the sky or we've been able to go deep and what is really different about these images is that it's both. It really is sort of simultaneously a very wide area so that you can see many galaxies you know, millions and millions of galaxies in one snapshot and then also go really deep and going deep will do two things. One, for the nearby galaxies, you can really see all the way into the outskirts, and you can see all these incredible details of how they formed and then for the far away galaxies, you just get so many of them. "
"We should be able to see the entire sky at that level of sensitivity, that level of spatial detail, and with that time resolution, to see how the university evolves, how variable stars are varying, how supernovae are exploding, how asteroids are moving within our own solar system," said Adam Bolton, SLAC Senior Scientist. "We have all that within a digital database that we can query in any way we could imagine. That's something that's never existed before."
Every night at Rubin Observatory in Chile, the digital camera will scan the sky, capturing a new 3,200-megapixel image every 40 seconds, providing near-real-time, valuable data of our universe.
"It really makes it clear that the universe is full of galaxies," said Marshall. "Our galaxy is full of stars and our universe is full of galaxies," said Marshall. "There's billions of them to be observed and you can see that in the images now, each one of those galaxies itself contains billions of stars, and so it's very humbling to see these images. It puts us right in our place, so to speak."
Marshall said these first images are truly awe-inspiring as scientists move one step closer to unlocking the mysteries of our universe.
The Rubin Observatory will continue capturing images of our universe in a 10-year scientific mission. The amount of data gathered by Rubin Observatory in its first year alone will be greater than that collected by all other optical observatories combined.
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the DOE.
