Vera Rubin Telescope's First Pictures: Here's All You Need To Know

Space enthusiasts across the world are all set to see the first pictures by Vera C Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be released on Monday (June 23) at 11:30 am (local time). The development is said to be most significant since the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were revealed in 2022.

What is the Vera C Rubin Observatory?

The Vera C Rubin Observatory, built by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science, is a cutting-edge astronomical observatory.

It is situated on the El Penon peak of Cerro Pachon, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in the Coquimbo Region, northern Chile.

The telescope, with an 8.4 metre-wide mirror, is equipped with the largest digital camera ever made. The camera's weight is around 3,000 kilograms.

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How will it work?

The Vera C Rubin Observatory will conduct an astronomical survey, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), mapping and cataloguing billions of galaxies to probe the nature of dark matter. It will capture the entire southern sky over Earth every three nights.

The camera will use six different coloured filters to take images in different light spectra. These filters will provide a spectacularly detailed view of the cosmos over time after combining.

"Until the images are revealed next week, all I can say is that people are going to be amazed at what we're able to see already," Andres Alejandro Plazas Malagon, a researcher at Stanford University and part of the Rubin Observatory's Community Science Team, told Space.com.

"I am excited about using the largest digital camera in the world for astronomy - the LSSTCam, with 3.2 gigapixels - to survey the entire sky visible from its location in Chile over a 10-year period. This is something that has never been done before.

"We will be able to gather more data than any galaxy survey to date to help answer fundamental open questions in astronomy."

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Who was Dr Vera Rubin?

The telescope has been named after Dr Vera C Rubin, honouring her legacy in exploring the universe. She was an American astronomer known for her work on galaxy rotation curves. Her work provided evidence for the existence of unseen "dark" matter.

The official website revealed that learning more about the "mysterious unseen matter" is one of the main science goals of the Rubin Observatory. "In fact, our original name was the Dark Matter Telescope!" it noted.