The universe’s darkest mysteries are coming into focus The newest eye on the cosmos is the Vera C Rubin Observatory, which houses the largest digital camera ever built For the next 10 years, the telescope will take advantage of its station under Chilean skies, some of the darkest on Earth, to conduct an astronomical survey more ambitious than any scientific instrument that came before it
1st images from the Vera C Rubin Observatory will drop on . . . Rubin and the dark universe The wide-field view of Rubin will see the LSST gather data that could finally solve lingering mysteries surrounding dark energy, the force that accounts for around 68%
Sharpening our cosmic focus | Rubin Observatory Using weak gravitational lensing, Rubin will map dark matter with unparalleled precision This technique measures how massive foreground galaxies bend light from distant background galaxies, creating a ‘cosmic mirage’ that distorts their shapes — a distortion scientists will use to ‘weigh’ the unseen dark matter holding galaxies together
Revolutionary Rubin Observatory debuts with first images . . . The observatory’s namesake, Vera C Rubin, was a pioneering American astronomer best known for her groundbreaking work on dark matter In the 1970s, she and her colleague Kent Ford discovered that stars at the edges of galaxies are not moving slower with increasing distance from the center—a phenomenon that couldn’t be explained on the
Opening a new window into the universe | UDaily Hong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, brings uncommon skills in data analysis to the effort A special focus of his research is developing algorithms that can make sense of “messy” big data, discovering underlying patterns in high-dimensional data sets
Blockbuster New Vera C. Rubin Observatory Will Change . . . With Rubin Observatory, researchers should be able to see all the stars in a galactic stream, detect the stream’s shape and even figure out what its associated dark matter must be like, Aganze says