Rubin Observatory unleashes world's largest digital camera on the cosmos — Made from more than 1 100 images captured by NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory, this image contains an immense variety of objects, demonstrating the broad range of science Rubin will transform with its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The image includes about 10 million galaxies, roughly 0.05% of the approximately 20 billion galaxies Rubin Observatory will capture over the next decade. Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory

The Vera C Rubin Observatory, which boasts the world’s largest digital camera, has begun displaying its first images of the cosmos, allowing astronomers to figure out how the solar system formed and even whether an asteroid poses a threat to Earth.

Located on Pachon Hill in the northern Chilean region of Coquimbo, the 8.4m telescope has a 3 200-megapixel camera feeding a powerful data processing system.

“It’s really going to change and challenge the way people work with their data,” said William O’Mullane, a project manager focused on data at Vera Rubin.

The observatory detected over 2 100 previously unseen asteroids in 10 hours of observations, focusing on a small area of the visible sky. Its ground-based and space-based peers discover in total some 20 000 asteroids a year.

O’Mullane said the observatory would allow astronomers to collect huge amounts of data quickly and make unexpected finds.

“Rather than the usual couple of observations and writing an academic paper. No, I’ll give you a million galaxies. I’ll give you a million stars or a billion even, because we have them: 20 billion galaxy measurements,” he said.

The centre is named after American astronomer Vera Rubin, a pioneer in finding conclusive evidence of the existence of large amounts of invisible material known as dark matter.

AI tools

Each night, Rubin will take some thousand images of the southern hemisphere sky, letting it cover the entire southern sky every three or four nights. The darkest skies above the arid Atacama Desert make Chile one of the best places worldwide for astronomical observation.

Read: What if the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning?

“The number of alerts the telescope will send every night is equivalent to the inboxes of 83 000 people. It’s impossible for someone to look at that one by one,” said astrophysicist Francisco Foster. “We’re going to have to use artificial intelligence tools.”

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