First heavenly image of a revolutionary telescope

A powerful new telescope in Chile released its first images, showing its unprecedented ability to look into the dark depths of the universe.

In a photo, huge colored clouds of gas and dust rotate in a star -forming region of 9,000 light -years from Earth.

Vera’s Observatory with Rubin, the home of the most powerful digital camera in the world, promises to transform our understanding of the universe.

If there is a ninth planet in our solar system, scientists say that this telescope would find it in its first year.

He must find the killer asteroids at a striking distance of the earth and map the Milky Way. It will also answer decisive questions about dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes the greater part of our universe.

This moment in a generation of astronomy is the beginning of a continuous 10-year shooting of the southern night sky.

“I have personally been working for this moment for about 25 years. For decades, we have wanted to build this phenomenal facility and do this type of study,” says Professor Catherine Hayman, astronomer Royal for Scotland.

The United Kingdom is a key partner in the study and will host data centers to process extremely detailed photos as the telescope sweeps the sky, capturing everything in its way.

Vera Rubin can increase the number of known objects in our solar system ten times.

BBC News visited the Vera Rubin Observatory before the images were released.

He sits at Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the Chilean Andes, which hosts several observatories of private land dedicated to space research.

Very high, very dry and very dark. This is the perfect place to watch the stars.

Maintaining this darkness is sacred. The bus ride up and down the windy road at night should be carried out cautiously, as full board headlights should not be used.

The interior of the observatory is no different.

There is an entire engineering unit dedicated to making sure that the dome around the telescope that opens to the night sky is dark – excluding cheaters or other stray lights that could interfere with the astronomical light that capture from the night sky.

Star light is “enough” for navigation, explains Elana Urbach.

One of the big goals of the observatory, she adds, is to “understand the history of the universe”, which means that you can see weak galaxies or explosions of supernova that happened “billions of years ago”.

“So we really need very sharp images,” Elana says.

Every detail of the observatory design shows such precision.

He achieves this through his unique three designs. The light enters the telescope from the night sky, hits the main mirror (diameter 8.4 m), affects the secondary mirror (3.4 m) back on a third mirror (4.8 m) before entering its chamber.

The mirrors should be stored in impeccable condition. Even dust stains can change the quality of the image.

The high reflectivity and speed of this allow the telescope to capture a lot of light that Gillem Magias, an active optics expert in the observatory, says it is “really important” to observe things from “really far away, which in astronomy means that they come from earlier times.”

The camera inside the telescope will repeatedly capture the night sky for ten years, every three days, for a hereditary study of space and time.

At 1.65mx 3M weighs 2800 kg and provides a wide field of view.

It will capture an image approximately every 40 seconds, about 8-12 hours a night thanks to the rapid repositioning of the moving dome and mounting a telescope.

It has 3200 megapixels (67 times more than the iPhone 16 Pro camera), which makes it such a high resolution that it can capture a golf ball on the moon and will require 400 Ultra HD TV screens to show an image.

“When we received the first photo here, it was a special moment,” said G -n Magias.

“When I first started working with this project, I met someone who has been working on it since 1996. I was born in 1997. It makes you realize that this is an endeavor for a generation of astronomers.”

It will be up to hundreds of scientists around the world to analyze the flow of data signals that will peak about 10 million per night.

The study will work in four areas: mapping changes in the sky or transitional objects, the formation of the Milky Way, the mapping of the solar system and the understanding of dark matter, or how the universe is formed.

But his largest power lies in his perseverance. He will explore the same areas again and again and every time he finds a change, warn scientists.

“This transitional country is a really new unique thing … which has the potential to show us something we didn’t even think about before,” explains Prof. Haymen.

But this can also help us protect us by finding dangerous objects that suddenly deviate close to Earth, including asteroids like the YR4, which scientists briefly worried early this year to break into our planet.

Many large camera mirrors will help scientists find the most glorious light and distortions emitted by these objects and track them by speeding up.

“This is transformative. It will be the largest set of data we have ever had to look at our galaxy. This will nourish what we have been doing for many, many years,” says Professor Alice Dayon of the University of Durham.

She will receive the images to analyze how much back the stars reach the Milky Way.

Currently, most of the stars are returning about 163,000 light years, but Vera Rubin could see up to 1.2 million light years.

Prof. Dayson also expects to see in the star haul of his Milky Way or his cemetery of stars, destroyed over time, as well as small satellite galaxies that still survive but are incredibly weak and difficult to find.

Vera Rubin is thought to be powerful enough to finally solve a long-standing mystery for the existence of the planet of our solar system nine.

This object can be as far as 700 times the distance between the earth and the sun, far beyond the reach of other ground telescopes.

“It will take us a long time to really understand how this new beautiful observatory works. But I’m so ready for that,” says Professor Haymans.

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