Jim McMahon
The universe is about to get its close-up. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new scientific facility more than two decades in the making, will provide a comprehensive view of the night sky unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The observatory, a joint venture of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, is located on a mountain in Chile. That’s one of the best places on Earth to study the cosmos, thanks to Chile’s dry air and dark skies. (Chilean scientists will be able to use the facility too.) At the observatory’s heart is the world’s largest digital camera, about the size of a small car. The groundbreaking technology will allow astronomers to investigate dark matter*, identify asteroids, discover millions of exploding stars, and more. Two of the observatory’s first images, revealed in June, show snippets of nebulas (clouds of dust and gas in space) and the Virgo Cluster, a group of galaxies 55 million light-years away. And experts are excited about what they’ll see next. Željko Ivezić, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington and the observatory’s director of construction, says the facility will allow scientists to “start producing the greatest movie of all time and the most informative map of the night sky ever assembled.”