Chilean astronomers to explore the universe with a mega camera the size of a car

Surrounded by the desert mountains and clear blue skies of northern Chile, astronomers at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory hope to revolutionize the study of the universe by attaching the world’s largest digital camera ever to a telescope.

The size of a small car and weighing 2.8 tonnes, the sophisticated equipment will reveal views of the cosmos like never before, officials of the US-funded project told AFP.

Starting in early 2025, when the $800 million camera takes its first photos, the machine will scan the sky every three days, allowing scientists to reach new heights in their galactic analyses.

Researchers will be able to go from “studying one star and knowing everything in depth about that star, to studying thousands of stars at once,” said Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Astronomical Society (Sochias).

According to Stuartt Corder, deputy director of NOIRLab, the U.S. research center that runs the observatory located 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) atop Cerro Pachon mountain, 560 kilometers (350 miles) north of Santiago, the new facility will usher in “a paradigm shift.” in astronomy.”

The project consolidates Chile’s dominant position in astronomical observation, as the South American country is home to a third of the world’s most powerful telescopes, according to Sochias, and has one of the clearest skies on the planet.

The Rubin Observatory camera’s first task will be to conduct a 10-year survey of the sky, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which researchers hope will reveal information about 20 million galaxies, 17 billion stars and six million space objects. .

The survey will provide scientists with an up-to-date inventory of images from the Solar System, allow them to map our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and further the study of energy and dark matter.

300 televisions for one image

The new camera will be capable of capturing 3,200-megapixel photos, resulting in images so large that it would take more than 300 medium-sized high-definition TVs, lined up together, to view just one.

The machine, built in California, will have triple the capacity of the world’s most powerful camera, Japan’s 870-megapixel Hyper Suprime-Cam, and will have six times the capacity of the most powerful camera from NOIRLab.

The lab’s existing top camera, located on Chile’s Cerro Tololo mountain, is just 520 megapixels, according to Jacques Sebag, head of construction of the Rubin telescope.

Chilean telescopes have come a long way since the 40-centimeter Cerro Tololo telescope, housed in the country’s first international observatory, installed in the 1960s.

“This telescope came here on the back of a mule, because there was no road,” said Stephen Heathcote, director of the Inter-American Observatory at Cerro Tololo, just 20 kilometers from Cerro Pachon.

World capital of astronomy

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named in honor of the American astronomer who discovered dark matter, will join several other space observation research centers in northern Chile.

The natural conditions of the region’s desert landscape, nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, create the clearest skies on the planet, thanks to a dry climate with little cloud cover.

The region is home to telescopes from more than 30 countries, including some of the most powerful astronomical instruments in the world, such as the radio telescope at the ALMA observatory and the under-construction Extremely Large Telescope, which by 2027 should be able to discover unprecedented expanses of the universe.

Many of humanity’s most important astronomical discoveries have been made at the Cerro Tololo Observatory, such as the 2011 Nobel Prize-winning revelation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon known as cosmic acceleration.

Although other influential observatories have been opened around the world, including in the United States, Australia, China and Spain, “Chile is unbeatable” in the world of astronomy, said Dias, president of Sochias.

© 2024 AFP