Rubin Observatory's First Image: The Ocean of Stars
- Andy McIlvain
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
Video from Space Mog
Rubin Observatory's First Image: The Ocean of Stars
"Hi Spacecats, I'm Dr Maggie Lieu and welcome to my channel, where you can find all things space, astronomy and physics!" from the video introduction
"Sometimes great ideas start as sketches on a napkin, and Rubin Observatory is one of those ideas. In the early 1990s, a group of scientists started to plan a new telescope that would push astronomy and astrophysics further than any other telescope built so far. In early brainstorming conversations, they focused mainly on dark matter—what could we learn about this mysterious unseen matter with a telescope that could see more than any other telescope in history? The concept of this “Dark Matter Telescope” evolved over the next few years and gained momentum when a 2001 report by the Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee—"Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium"—recommended it as a major initiative. By then, this telescope had come to be called the “Large-Aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope,” and scientists were excited about its potential to answer all kinds of science questions, in addition to questions about dark matter.
This new telescope would be able to detect very faint objects. It would catalog 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids—which would help assess the threat of an impact with Earth. The telescope would also be able to image fainter and/or more distant objects in our Solar System than we've ever seen before, which could help us understand more about how the Solar System formed. And it would be uniquely able to detect temporary events, like supernovae, that are easy to miss unless scientists happen to look in the right place at the right time. Most excitingly, data from this telescope would be widely available to both scientists and the public, so more people than ever before could explore the Universe and make discoveries!..." from rubinobservatory.org
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