Observatory in Chile will have the largest digital camera in the world – 01/29/2024 – Science

Surrounded by desert mountains and under the blue sky of northern Chile, astronomers at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory hope to revolutionize the study of the Universe by incorporating the largest digital camera ever built in the world into a telescope.

The size of a four-person vehicle and weighing 2.8 tons, the sophisticated device will be installed in a telescope under construction and will be capable of covering the sky like never before, those responsible for the project, financed by the United States, told AFP.

At a cost of around US$800 million (R$3.95 billion), it will begin capturing images in the first half of 2025. Every three days, it will scan the sky, and repeat the movement several times, which will allow scientists to deepen their analysis of the Universe.

We will go from “studying a star and knowing all the in-depth physics of that star, to studying billions of stars at once”, says Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Astronomy Society (Sochias).

“It will be a paradigm shift in astronomy”, adds Stuartt Corder, deputy director of NoirLab, an American research center that manages the observatory located on Mount Pachón, 560 km from Santiago and more than 2,500 meters above sea level.

With this project, Chile, which has the cleanest skies on the planet, is consolidating itself as a power in astronomical observation, with a third of the most powerful telescopes in the world installed on its territory, according to data from Sochias.

It is expected that in ten years, LSST —an acronym in English for Legacy Research on Time and Space— will have data on 20 million galaxies, 17 billion stars and 6 million space objects.

Scientists will renew the catalog of images of the Solar System, in addition to being able to map the Milky Way and advance the study of energy and dark matter, which makes up 90% of the Universe.

300 screens for one photo

The camera will capture 3,200-megapixel photographs. An image so large that it takes more than 300 medium-sized high-definition televisions together to view it.

The device, which is being manufactured in California, will have a capacity three times greater than that of the current most powerful camera, the Japanese Hyper Suprime-Cam, with 870 megapixels. And it will be six times more powerful than NoirLab’s current best camera.

“The camera that exists, that is in the [monte chileno de] Fool, it’s 520 megapixels”, says Jacques Sebag, who heads the construction of the telescope that will have the megacamera incorporated.

This telescope has a mirror measuring 8.4 meters in diameter and to transport it over land it will be necessary to use several trucks and remove traffic signs from the path, say those responsible.

The contrast is great in relation to the telescope measuring just 40 centimeters that arrived in Chile more than 60 years ago, when the country’s first international observatory was inaugurated in Tololo, in the 1960s.

“This telescope arrived here on the back of a mule, because there was no road,” says Stephen Heathcote, director of the Cerro Tololo Observatory, which is 20 km from Pachón.

Capital of astronomy

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named after the American astronomer who discovered dark matter, joins other major observational study centers in northern Chile.

The natural conditions of the deserts in the north of the country, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountain range, generate the cleanest skies on the planet, thanks to their low cloud cover and dry climate.

Chile is home to telescopes from more than 30 countries, including some of the most powerful astronomical instruments in the world, such as the Alma Observatory, the most powerful radio telescope and the future Extremely Large Telescope, which in 2027 will reach never-before-seen distances.

At the Cerro Tololo Observatory, great discoveries were made, such as the accelerated expansion of the Universe, which earned a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 for Americans Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess and Australian Brian Schmidt.

Although other countries, such as the United States, Australia, China and Spain, also have powerful observation devices in their territories, “Chile is unbeatable” in the field of astronomy, says the president of Sochias.