Rubin Observatory begins mission to film universe

Perched atop a mountain in Chile’s Coquimbo region, where some of the world’s darkest skies stretch over the Andes, a giant ​observatory has begun filming the infinite to create the first movie ‌of the universe.

The Vera C Rubin Observatory, a joint programme of the US National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab and the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, officially launched its ​decade-long survey of the night sky on June 29.

Equipped with a massive ​3.2-billion-pixel camera, the facility will photograph the entire visible southern sky every three to four nights, generating a constantly updated record of cosmic ​change.

“Rubin is a new way of really looking at the universe,” said Stuartt Corder, ​mission scientist for AURA in Chile and deputy director of NOIRLab. “It’s providing a sort of a movie of the night sky instead of snapshots of small parts of the sky, ​which is how traditional astronomy has been done.”

Rubin will repeatedly scan vast portions ​of the sky, tracking how stars, galaxies, and other objects evolve over time, which Corder ‌says will give a dynamic view of how measurements and objects are changing.

Astronomers will be alerted when a star explodes, an asteroid passes nearby or an unfamiliar object suddenly appears, and be able to track it.