Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the largest digital camera
Observatorio Vera C. Rubin y la mayor cámara digital
- Date
- 2025 · confidence medium
- Place
- Cerro Pachón, Chile
- Credited to
- NSF and the US Department of Energy; SLAC (3,200-megapixel camera); first images in June 2025
- Field
- Communication
What it is
An 8.4 m telescope that will photograph the entire southern sky every few nights for ten years with the largest digital camera ever built. It will produce a time-lapse video of the universe with millions of nightly alerts on changing objects.
Named in honour of Vera Rubin, who discovered the evidence for dark matter in galaxies.
What it led to
- Big-data astronomy and the detection of hazardous asteroids
- The study of dark energy and dark matter at statistical scale
- Open science with public real-time alerts
Built on
- Charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor1969
- Hubble Space Telescope1990
- CCD sensor
- Hubble telescope
- Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Made possible
- near-Earth asteroid catalogue
- time-domain astronomy