Rubin Observatory Credit: H.Stockebrand
The observatory’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope can capture the largest field of view of any telescope currently in operation, covering the entirety of the night sky over the course of a few nights. It creates composite images approximately 70 times larger than the apparent size of the full moon. These images are 3,200-megapixel in resolution—more than 65x times more detailed than the latest iPhone.
For the U’s own astrophysics researchers, there is palpable excitement as they plan on utilizing the Rubin data for new research projects.
“We’ve all been preparing for this day, and it’s finally here! There’s already some cool science being done with just the First Look images; imagine what we can do with the full data set!” said Yao-Yuan Mao, assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy.
Mao has been involved with the Rubin research community for more than a decade, most actively in the Dark Energy Science Collaboration. The operation of the Rubin Observatory represents the culmination of years of design and planning.
“I am particularly excited about how Rubin data will enable us to find some of the smallest galaxies in our neighborhood, helping us understand how galaxies form and grow throughout the cosmic time and even reveal the nature of dark matter,” added Mao.
In addition to the ability to capture gigantic still pictures, the Rubin Observatory can also record the movements in the cosmos. The Observatory had been designed from its inception to detect up to 90% of near-Earth asteroids, advance the study of how our solar system formed, and observe phenomena such as supernovae or tidal disruption events with greater ability.
“I’m really excited for Rubin and have been looking forward to it for many years. For me, the most exciting part of Rubin will be its ability to detect tidal disruption events, which happen when a star comes too close to a massive black hole and is torn apart by the black hole’s gravity,” said Anil Seth, professor of physics and astronomy. “We have previously detected about a hundred of these events, but Rubin is predicted to detect more than 10 new tidal disruption events each night. My PhD student Christian Hannah has been working on predicting how we can use these events to understand for the first time whether small galaxies still all have massive black holes at their centers. These observations will help us understand the currently not understood formation mechanisms of the massive black holes we find at the centers of galaxies.”
The observatory honors the legacy of Vera C. Rubin, whose pioneering research on galaxy rotation produced the first accepted evidence of dark matter’s existence. All-in-all, this marks the beginning of a new and exciting era of astrophysics research. The Rubin Observatory is planned to operate for at least ten years for its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), producing hundreds of images and data for researchers and the general public.
The Rubin Observatory project was jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science.
by Ethan Hood
This story originally appeared in @ TheU