New Telescope Captures The Cosmos In Groundbreaking Detail

The telescope has the largest digital camera ever made. It's so precise that one image alone contains 10 million galaxies.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC is supported by Bayer. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:15Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, Flor Lichtman here, and you are listening to Science Friday.

• 0:21Flora Lichtman?

  Today in the podcast, a dazzling new glimpse of the universe.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Just the number of stars that are in those images just keeps blowing my mind over and over again every time I open them up.

• 0:39Flora Lichtman?

  In breaking space news, the very first images from the brand-new Vera C. Rubin Observatory have been unveiled. This massive telescope sits high atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, and it's equipped with the largest digital camera on the planet. It is producing cosmic lam shots that are giving us a brand-new view of the universe. Here with the details is Dr. Federica Bianco, an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware and the deputy project scientist for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

• 1:14Flora Lichtman?

  It's nice to have something to celebrate.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Indeed, and it's been a long way. We've been building this observatory for upwards of 20 years. I have personally been involved for upwards of 10. So yeah, a long way.

• 1:28Flora Lichtman?

  Is it like graduation day? What does it feel like?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  It's, is it like graduation day? Yeah, maybe. It's just, you know, I think I'm still processing and I'm still digesting it. And part of it is because the images look so good that maybe they don't really even look real to my eyes.

• 1:46Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, are they better than you expected?

• 1:49Speaker 02

  I think so, yes, they are. Yeah.

• 1:51Flora Lichtman?

  Really?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  I think they're more sensational. The gradient of colors that we see is just mind-blowing. The number, just the number of stars that are in those images just keeps blowing my mind over and over again every time I open them up.

• 2:06Flora Lichtman?

  I can hear it in your voice, but translate it for us non-astronomers. Why is this such a big deal? Why is this so exciting?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this survey is really a significant step above anything else that has been done before. Over the course of ten years, we will look at as much of the sky that you can see from an observatory that is on the ground, with its feet on earth. That's half of the sky, that is accessible, in fact, a little bit more. And we'll look at it over and over again. Eventually, we'll have eight hundred images for every position in the Southern Hemisphere sky. And in addition, we'll have a few areas that will be observed with ten times as many images even. We'll be able to see the things that change on short time scales, from hours, days,

• 2:58Speaker 02

  and on long time scales, a whole decade. So all of the things in the sky that look so static to our eyes, you know, we build this idea of a reliable, never-changing sky, like it's a theme across cultures, in the mythology of humans, but it couldn't be far from the truth.

• 3:17Flora Lichtman?

  So this is like a time lapse of the sky?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we like to call it a cosmic movie.

• 3:23Flora Lichtman?

  A cosmic movie, well, that's a better word, that is better branding. Okay, but what does change? You know, this is kind of shaking my conception of the night sky. So what are the kind of the changes that you expect to see, or what are you looking for?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Until maybe the early nineteen hundreds, we just did not know that most things in the sky change. We had seen that some stars change their brightness, maybe their color. But the majority of the things looked like they were not evolving, because they evolve on time scales that are typically longer than the life of a human. But if you look farther away and you look at more and more things, you catch these stars when they die. And when they die, they die suddenly and explosively in most cases. That's one of the things that we will see many, many more than ever before. Supernove, that's the technical word. But until the early nineteen hundreds, we could see maybe one a century,

• 4:19Speaker 02

  because that's roughly speaking the rate at which that happens inside of a typical galaxy. One star explodes every one hundred years, very roughly. But now we can look at billions of galaxies. So we can see this happening all around us all the time.

• 4:36Flora Lichtman?

  A lot's gonna be popping off.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yes. And that's only one of the things. There's stars that get eaten up by the black holes in the center of galaxies, and that produces some delightful cosmic fireworks. There are stars that merge. Probably, most people have heard of the fact that we can now detect gravitational waves. In some cases, those come from stars that collide and merge, and that also produces electromagnetic signatures, or fireworks that we can detect and see with our telescopes.

• 5:11Flora Lichtman?

  Wow, so it can give you some insight into some of the biggest questions that we're wondering about.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:17Flora Lichtman?

  Dark matter, dark energy.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Indeed. Those are some of the huge questions, some of the most well-known mysteries of, in our understanding of the universe. Rubin Observatory is designed with the goal, among others, to really shed some light on these dark sector components, dark energy and dark matter.

• 5:39Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. Okay, so the telescope took a couple decades to build. Can you give us a picture of it? And how does it work? I've been hearing it's the biggest digital camera on the planet. Like, I want to know more.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  So I used to say, like, oh, it's like a small European car. And then I was in Greece for a conference just two weeks ago, and I rented a small European car. And I forgot how small they get.

• 6:02Flora Lichtman?

  It's much bigger than a small European car.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Much bigger. It's more like an American-sized car, yes, indeed. So it's the largest camera ever built. It's on the Guinness World Record already. It's physically large, has a lot of pixels, 3.2 gigapixels, so 3 billion pixels in every image that we take. One way to sort of relate to this, perhaps, is to think about the Sphere in Las Vegas, which probably many people have heard of. It's, you know, this great and normal screen, the largest screen in the world. You two was in residence at the Sphere.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  But they're not big enough to show a single one of our images at full resolution. They can only show a fraction of one. That's how big our images are.

• 6:56Flora Lichtman?

  I want to talk about some of the images that were released. There's one that I feel like I've seen everywhere. It is massive. It's just like you can't, there's just speckles everywhere, right? Like, you just can't believe how much is going on in them. Sparkly glowing orbs, different colors, blue, little blue shining things, little red shining things. Will you describe it better than I just did, please?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  I think that was fantastic. But yeah, so you're looking at the Virgo cluster and you're looking at a region of roughly five full fields of view of Rubin Observatory. That's a very large chunk of the sky. You can see all sorts of things there. You can see galaxies, you can see stars. We have an app, it's called the Sky Viewer, which we built to enable this experience through our images.

• 7:50Flora Lichtman?

  I'm going to open it up and maybe we can, we can look at it together. It's skyviewer.app, right?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:56Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so I'm going to turn it on. I'm in, I'm in the picture and I'm actually, I'm not just, I'm not just seeing things, I'm actually hearing things. There's a sonic component.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yes, we're so proud of that.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Obviously astronomy is a very visual science, but that's not the only way that you can absorb information and you can extract data. And also, we want people that may not be sighted to be able to experience our data and to do science with our data. So think about an astrophysical image. There's going to be some galaxies. Those are diffuse, large, you see like a blob of light. There's going to be some stars. Those are going to be little dots and points and they're going to be different colors and they're going to be different shapes. As the cursor, as the, the target moves around, different stars enter that circle.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  And those stars are sonified in different ways, at different pitches, depending on the brightness and the color.

• 9:02Flora Lichtman?

  And you know what? When I zoom out.

• 9:07Flora Lichtman?

  My circle, of course, has a bigger field of view and it's just like the twinkling, it's like wind chimes on 11.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Exactly, yes.

• 9:16Flora Lichtman?

  And if I zoom in, it gets sparser and sparser because I'm only seeing a star here and there.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. And this is a different way of interacting with the data.

• 9:26Flora Lichtman?

  That is so cool. This telescope took decades of investment, international collaboration. You know, honestly, in some ways, it feels like a project out of a different time, maybe even a different universe. Given the cuts that we are seeing to science today, how do you make sense of these two things together?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  This is a difficult question, of course. Without speculating about what might happen, this was a very significant investment by the national agencies, the NSF and the UU. It was a significant investment which they made because this was deemed the priority by the scientific community to build an observatory that could do this. And I, obviously, I personally think that that was an excellent idea. And one of the aspects for which I think that was an excellent idea is because I truly believe that this observatory can build a legacy data set for humanity. Our data is available to anybody in the US and Chile immediately.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  After two years, the data becomes public worldwide. The alerts, the thing that tell you about things that change in the night sky that are released in real time are worldwide accessible, no proprietary period from the start. This will be a data set that will capture how the sky looks now before we modify it too much with human-made satellites zooming around it and will immortalize it sort of in a way that has not been done before. We have great expectation that this data set will help us answer some key questions about how the universe works, about maybe our place in the universe,

• 11:18Speaker 02

  but will also really capture the imagination of generations and will get us to ask more questions.

• 11:26Flora Lichtman?

  Is there anything you're particularly interested? Any secrets you really want uncovered?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  The secrets that I want to be surprised. The really, the thing that I want is a surprise for me. I know there's going to be many things that are probably going to be surprising about stellar mergers, about stellar disruptions by black holes, stellar flares. But I want us to detect something that we really don't understand how it works and that doesn't fit in the way in which we think physics works.

• 12:02Flora Lichtman?

  Well, I hope you get your wish and I suspect you will because that is always the story of science, I feel like, especially when it comes to the cosmos.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 12:11Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Federica Bianco is an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware and the deputy project scientist for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. To see the images we talked about and explore yourself, head to sciencefriday.com/skyview.

• 12:30Flora Lichtman?

  Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review us if you like the show. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We'd love to hear from you. Today's episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.