Us astronomers and astrophysicists have been waiting for this moment for a LONG time: the first images from the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile were released this month and they are unlike anything we’ve seen before.
First proposed back in 2001, and after 15 years of construction, this is a telescope that is now set to image the entire sky every 3 nights: if anything moves, changes, or flares in the sky, we will spot it with Rubin’s 8.4m telescope.
Rubin is one of the most ambitious astronomy projects we’ve ever seen, not because of its size, but because of the sheer scale of what its going to attempt to do: image the entire sky every 3 nights for 10 years, slowly collecting more light to detect ever fainter objects.
Its estimated that it will detect 20 billion objects in the sky over those 10 years, and flag 10 million things that change in the sky after each 3 day pass. In 10 years of operations, it will collect around 60 petabytes of data.
But today I want to chat about these first images released from just 7 days of observing (that give us a taste of what we can expect over the next 10 years), detecting 2000 asteroids in just that tiny patch of sky in a short space of time!