At the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, astronomers have officially begun the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on June 30—turning on an 8.4-meter mirror and a 3,200-megapixel camera to repeatedly scan the entire southern sky. The project a
The start felt less like a switch being flipped than like a camera finally finding its subject.
This week. astronomers began production on what is being billed as the largest cosmic time-lapse humanity has ever planned—set to run at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, not in Hollywood. The observatory will use the world’s largest digital camera to scan the entire southern sky every few nights. building an unprecedented. richly detailed record of how the universe changes.
The project. officially launched as the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on June 30. is built around an 8.4-meter-wide mirror that gathers starlight. Rubin opened its eye to the sky about a year ago. but scientists spent the intervening time testing and fine-tuning its optics. For many on the team, the moment still landed like something personal.
“‘It’s an amazing feeling—I’ve been working for over two decades on it,’ says Željko Ivezic, head of the LSST. ‘It reminded me of the birth of my child. You wait, you wait and finally it materializes. We’ve been hoping for this night for quite a while.’”
Rubin’s mission is not simply to see farther. It is to keep watching.
The 3,200-megapixel camera—built by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory—can take an image of the sky roughly every 40 seconds. Rubin’s giant mirror. Ivezic said. gives the observatory a field of view about 100 times larger than that of similar telescopes and lets it scan 100 times faster. He added that the data Rubin will amass over the coming decade would take any other observatory a millennium or more to capture.
LSST is designed to focus on the changeable aspects of the heavens: sudden sparks of light, stars that mysteriously vanish, space rocks whizzing around the solar system, and—at the largest scale of all—the dark energy-driven accelerating expansion of the universe itself.
The stakes are sharpest in Rubin’s attempt to address one of cosmology’s biggest uncertainties. After five to seven years of observing. Ivezic says. scientists should be in a position to tell apart two major hypotheses about dark energy. In one scenario. dark energy is a real phenomenon pushing the universe to grow bigger at a faster and faster rate. In the other. there is no dark energy at all. and scientists have somehow misunderstood the laws of gravity at cosmic scales.
“If we manage to answer this question, that will be the most fundamental result of Rubin and LSST,” Ivezic said.
That long-term test sits alongside a shorter, more immediate kind of work: spotting moving danger and fleeting brilliance. Rubin will look for undiscovered asteroids—including potentially hazardous ones heading toward Earth—and it is expected to discover millions of new asteroids. including those that may be on collision courses with Earth.
Rubin also has a revolutionary potential for studies of transients: flashes of light that abruptly appear and quickly fade. These include supernovae and other cataclysms, such as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Some GRBs arise from colliding black holes or neutron stars. and they are among the most powerful explosions in the universe. Many aspects of the physics behind GRBs remain enigmatic. but Rubin’s ability to uncover entirely new types of transients could deliver fresh leads to solve more cosmic mysteries.
The observatory project is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Now. as Rubin begins its 10-year LSST run officially on June 30. the promise is straightforward: by watching the sky repeatedly—every few nights. every 40 seconds at a time—it will produce the kind of record that turns the universe from something static into something we can measure minute by minute. and decade by decade.
Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST Legacy Survey of Space and Time Chile astronomy 3 200-megapixel camera 8.4-meter mirror dark energy dark matter cosmic time-lapse asteroids gamma-ray bursts supernovae transients SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory U.S. National Science Foundation U.S. Department of Energy