The Vera Rubin Observatory unveiled its first images on Monday, showcasing its record-breaking 3,200-megapixel camera. This revolutionary telescope will map the night sky, research dark matter and uncover surprises nightly.

The Vera Rubin Observatory held a news conference Monday to unveil its first images to the public.

VRO is named after the American astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who first established the presence of dark matter due to her work involving galaxies.

And one word describes the observatory and its images: Wow!

This ground-based observatory, located on a remote and high mountain top in Chile, will have digital photographic and data set processing capabilities that no other telescope has.

It took over 20 years to build at a cost of $800 million. VRO boasts the largest digital camera in the world and is listed as such in the “Guinness Book of World Records.”

With 3,200 megapixels, and covering an area of the sky equivalent to 45 full moons for each image, it would require 4,000 4K television sets to view the full image. Each night, 20 terabytes of data are downloaded.

VRO can image the entire sky as seen from the observatory in just three to four nights and image objects, such as asteroids (VRO discovered 2,104 new asteroids in 10 hours observing) and comets in the solar system. It can also spot astronomical objects in the celestial neighborhood and much farther away. VRO will also help to study dark matter and dark energy.

With this groundbreaking and unique capability, the primary goal of VRO and its mega camera is to conduct a 10-year study called the “Legacy Survey of Space and Time” to capture the changes that will take place each clear night across the sky. This treasure chest of imagery and data about the universe will give the public and astronomers a “home movie” of their universe.

The night sky changes constantly from one night to the next. VRO will capture an estimated 10 million changes each night in almost real time, with 30-second exposures taken during the night’s observing run.

Utilizing the enormous 8.4-meter primary mirror and unique three-mirror optical design coupled with powerful data processing, VRO can detect these changes and will issue alerts.

“To deal with this potentially-overwhelming alert stream, Rubin routes alerts to ‘brokers,’ who have developed software to categorize the alerts. So imagine you’re a scientist studying supernovas — thanks to the work of the alert brokers, you can log into the Rubin Science Platform to access Rubin data and filter the millions of alerts to study only the ones that were categorized as supernovas,” the observatory said.

What is the most anticipated discovery to be made by the large synoptic survey telescope, or LSST, and what surprises await?

Scientists will be looking for “unknown unknowns” and discoveries that will be made, including the 5 million asteroids anticipated to be discovered.

Not everything will be a discovery. Scientists are also doing precise measurements (trillions) in cosmology, in dark matter and dark energy.

Context will be provided by measuring things precisely. That’s one of the goals.

Scientists will get some unexpected discoveries, such as interstellar objects. It’s now in position to get 10 or 15 of them, and get much better understanding. There are two that are known, Oumuamua and Borisov, so a lot will be learned.

Of course, there is the survey. Prior to Rubin and LSST, every big project that scanned the sky discovered many unexpected things. But then again, different people are excited about different things. One of them is the time domain context.

Dr. Federico Bianco, the VRO deputy project scientist said, “Well, I’m going to double down on the unknown unknowns. I love the question because can you tell us what the surprise is? No, it’s a surprise. That’s a bit tautological.”

And it’s really exciting that it is a surprise, because it is still going to be difficult to find those things that we have never seen before.

People make the analogy that it’s like a needle in a haystack. It’s not.

It’s a needle in a haystack if you don’t know what the shape of the needle is, if you don’t know what the color of the needle is, if you don’t know whether the needle moves through the haystack, and if you don’t know really what the haystack is composed of because there’s millions of things in the haystack. We don’t know all of them to the same level of detail.

It’s really an adventurous horizon, and I’m very glad that we can all answer the question, “What surprises there are going to be?” because they’re really surprising.

The public is invited to share in the discoveries by participating in a number of VRO research projects. You can also get a new U.S. Mint Vera Rubin quarter.

Full operation at VRO is expected to commence in the next few months. Oh, the wonders and beauty we will see!

Follow my daily blog to keep up with the latest news in astronomy and space exploration. You can email me at skyguyinva@gmail.com.

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