🔭 The world's largest digital camera weighs as much as a car and takes 3200-megapixel images of the sky

• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile can photograph the entire visible sky in just three days with its 3200-megapixel camera.
• The telescope will detect up to 10 million changes in the sky each night and send automatic alerts within one minute.
• During the first 10 years, the observatory will collect more optical astronomical data than all previous telescopes combined.

Telescope built for speed

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón in Chile is designed to move quickly. The 350-ton telescope floats on a thin film of oil and can rotate so fast that a runner wouldn't be able to keep up. The steel mount that holds the mirror is low and robust but also lightweight to be able to move quickly and stop abruptly, writes Science.

The three-ton camera is as large as a car and can take 3200-megapixel images in less than three seconds. Each snapshot takes 30 seconds, then the telescope moves to a new view in less than five seconds. In this way, it builds up a patchwork picture of the entire sky visible from Chile in just three days before starting over again.

Universe filmed in slow motion

Unlike most telescopes that zoom in on particular objects, Rubin marches relentlessly across the firmament, capturing sections with a field of view that covers the equivalent of 45 full moons. At each stop, the camera records the view with 189 light sensors cooled to minus 100 degrees Celsius. The images become so detailed that it would require a wall of 400 ultra-high-definition TV screens to display them in full size.

By comparing each new image with what has come before, Rubin detects everything that has moved, changed brightness, or suddenly appeared. Within one minute of dispatching an image, the processing center at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California will generate alerts for each new change - up to 10 million every night.

New discoveries in the solar system

Some of the discoveries will be close to home, in the solar system: millions of new asteroids and other objects. The telescope might even find the elusive Planet 9, a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune. Farther out, in and around the Milky Way, each Rubin snapshot will capture on average about 7200 variable stars, such as Cepheids, which are used to measure distances and probe the chemical makeup of stars.

Beyond the Milky Way, Rubin will spy hundreds of thousands of cosmic cataclysms each night. They could include a giant star ending its life in a supernova blast, a huge black hole tearing apart a star that strayed too close, or two orbiting neutron stars merging in a titanic crash.

Deepest map of the cosmos

Rubin won't ignore objects that persist through time. By repeatedly "stacking" images as the 10-year survey progresses, it will slowly build up the deepest and most detailed map ever made of the cosmos. It will include billions of galaxies, some of them shining with light that began its journey 11 billion years ago, when the universe was less than one-quarter of its current age.

The vast archive grows by 20 terabytes each night and will after one year contain more optical astronomy data than all previous telescopes combined have produced. The survey is scheduled to begin in about six months. The first test images will be revealed to the public on June 23.

800 million dollar investment

The 800 million dollar observatory is funded by the US National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and private donors. It is as much a data factory as a telescope. SLAC and the US National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory have created a whole new infrastructure to handle Rubin's deluge of images.

In addition to generating the nightly alerts about changes, SLAC, along with satellite centers in Europe, will clean up the images, compile data into annual releases, and make them available via an online portal to astronomers and the public in the United States as well as Canada, Chile, France, and the United Kingdom.

Machine learning for the future

Around the world, researchers have spent years developing machine learning and artificial intelligence systems to cope with the coming flood of new objects. Scores of other telescopes, some of them completely robotic, are ready to zoom in and monitor the new transients to see what they are and how they evolve.

Researchers will learn how galaxies evolve and grow, and from their distribution across time and space, infer how they are influenced by dark matter and dark energy - two mysterious substances that, though unseen, are thought to together make up 95 percent of the contents of the universe.

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