In a packed Menlo Park auditorium, astronomers, physicists and engineers leaned forward in anticipation. On a screen in front of them, the universe came into view — captured by a telescope a hemisphere away, using a car-sized digital camera built in their own backyard.
The pictures elicit gasps, oohs and applause.
“Most of these objects have never been seen by people before,” said Željko Ivezić, an astrophysicist and lead for the construction and design of the telescope.
One of the images, a section of the southern night sky captured in mind-boggling detail, holds speckled points of light sprayed over a dark background, with bursts of light and chains of spiral galaxies. Another showed more than 2,000 newly discovered asteroids found during just one week of observation. Another revealed two nebulae, giant clouds of pink and orange gas and dust where new stars are born.
All of these photographs were made possible by a telescope which sits atop a mountain in north central Chile — the Vera C. Rubin telescope — arguably the most powerful in the world. Nestled together with the telescope is a digital camera assembled over a decade at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, a national laboratory in Menlo Park.
Travis Lange, camera project manager, began building the one-of-a-kind device in 2014 and completed it last May. At 3,200 megapixels, the machine is the Guinness World Records holder for the largest digital camera. Lange beamed, speaking about its performance.
“It was a challenge to get this thing built,” he said. “There’s no backup. We didn’t have a prototype.”
The most minute detail could cause malfunction.
“Getting all those different systems to function correctly, it took a lot,” Lange said.
To share the first images, he added, felt “amazing.”
“Everybody on this project really put in a lot of passion,” Lange said. “Seeing these images for the first time is just one of the greatest joys, I mean it’s really incredible.”
As the telescope embarks on its 10-year mission, its operators are focusing on four main science areas: completing a census of the solar system; studying the Milky Way’s structure and formation; chronicling the changing sky and gathering data that can be used to study dark matter and dark energy.
“We will be using this legacy dataset for years and years to come. It’s an absolute gold mine for astronomers to use across the world,” said Phil Marshall, deputy director of operations for Rubin Observatory.
“We’ll be able to answer questions like, how did our Milky Way form? How did it develop? We’ll be looking for new discoveries in the solar system, new discoveries and the changing night sky,” Marshall said. “And we’ll be able to measure the properties of this mysterious dark energy that’s causing the accelerating expansion of the universe.”
The camera, telescope and observatory were jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, with the NSF funding the construction of the observatory and the DOE funding the construction of the camera. Each was a several-hundred-million-dollar investment. The project’s annual operational cost is about $70 million a year, split evenly between the two funders.
It is unclear how secure their ongoing funding is. When asked about the budgetary outlook, several Rubin scientists expressed appreciation for funding received so far and said they didn’t want to speculate about the future, referring further questions to the agencies themselves.
Data from the telescope and camera will be available to the public through the Rubin Observatory website.
The observatory’s name honors Vera C. Rubin, the pioneering astronomer whose work studying the rotation of galaxies revealed the first observational evidence of dark matter — the mysterious, invisible mass that holds our galaxy together but eludes direct detection.
Now, a telescope bearing her name is ready to deepen our understanding of this and other universal mysteries.
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