- This week, photos of the universe were released from the largest digital camera ever built.
- Over the next 10 years, it is expected to discover 20 billion galaxies, 10 million supernovas and millions of asteroids and comets.
- The observatory is located on a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes.
Pictures of the universe taken by the largest digital camera ever built were released on Monday. The shots include colorful nebulas, stars and galaxies.
The camera is a part of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located on a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes. It was built to get a deeper look into the night sky, revealing what hides in hidden corners, according to The Associated Press.
The observatory will begin a 10-year mission later this year, during which it is predicted to discover 20 billion galaxies, 10 million supernovas and millions of asteroids and comets, per Forbes.
What is the Rubin Observatory?
The observatory is situated on Cerro Pachón, an 8,900-foot mountain peak that is accessed from the Elqui Valley near La Serena, Chile. It is in the foothills of the Andes and in the southern Atacama Desert, one of Earth’s driest places, which also has the clearest sky.
“It’s far from light pollution and major flight paths. The Southern Hemisphere also offers a clearer view of the Milky Way’s center, which is dense with star fields and nebulae, as well as of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way,” per Forbes.
The observatory is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
The project is named after Vera Rubin, an astronomer who offered the first evidence of the mysterious force known as dark matter lurking in the universe. Researchers hope that the camera will yield clues about dark matter and dark energy, per NBC News.
Keith Bechtol, the project’s system verification and validation scientist who is also an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared what it was like when the first photos came through.
“There were moments in the control room where it was just silence, and all the engineers and all the scientists were just seeing these images, and you could just see more and more details in the stars and the galaxies,” Bechtol told NBC News. “It was one thing to understand at an intellectual level, but then on this emotional level, we realized basically in real time that we were doing something that was really spectacular.”
What is featured in these first photos?
Some of the photos released this week feature the vibrant Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, which are located thousands of light-years from Earth, per the AP. One composite photo shows bright pink clouds of gas and dust that light up the nebulas.
Also captured were a gaggle of galaxies known as the Virgo Cluster, which includes two bright blue spirals.
A video that was released uncovered a horde of new asteroids, including 2,104 that had never been seen before and seven near-Earth asteroids that don’t pose a danger to the planet, according to NBC.