The most complex telescope ever built

https://static.scientificamerican.com/dam/m/52275a173d792b79/original/Rubin_Observatory_sunset.jpg
Souce

Normally I talk to you about astronomy, because we like astronomy, we like telescopes, I have told you about the James Web space telescopes, the Hubble, but this publication is about the most complex telescope that has ever been built, despite having cost only a tenth of what the James Webb space telescope cost, the complexity of its construction is unprecedented.

Its optics, structure and mechanisms allow it to scan the sky at full speed as if it did not weigh 350 tons, its camera, the largest, most powerful and most expensive in the world, is the size of a small car and cost 168 million dollars and is capable of taking 3,200 megapixel photographs with six filters ranging from near infrared to ultraviolet.

And the infrastructure necessary to transmit petabytes of information across the continent by means of fiber optics will allow the entire scientific community and idiots like me to consult each image of the thousands that will be taken every night practically in real time.

https://youtu.be/NUwV_vc9fik

If you are a scientist who wants to use a large telescope for some research, you have to ask for it, request in writing the minutes you need to use the telescope and say where you are going to point it and what your research is for, if the topic is interesting or important enough, they will allow you to use it for that number of minutes, not one more, because someone else needs it after you.

But with this telescope there is no limit, there is no bureaucracy, there is no one deciding who can use the telescope and who cannot, the telescope literally scans every part of the sky all the time permanently and that enormous amount of information is stored and is available to whoever needs it, including you and me, in fact, the Vera Rubin observatory will produce much more information than we are capable of analyzing, we are going to lack hands to analyze all that data.

Fortunately it has automated processes. For example, the telescope takes a photograph of a piece of the sky and automatically compares it with the other photographs taken in previous days of that same piece of sky. If there is something different between those photos, the telescope can interpret that there is a spy satellite or that here comes a new asteroid or that a supernova has just exploded in a neighboring galaxy and immediately generates a notification announcing the event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azjgJaWOWjI

In its first 10 hours of observation spread over seven nights, the Vera Rubin observatory discovered more than 2,100 asteroids; at that rate, in one year, it will collect more astronomical information than that produced by all astronomical observatories in history on land and in orbit combined. This overwhelming ability to report anything that happens in the sky, from spy satellites and asteroids to distant galaxies, serves us well for many things.

One of them, which is quite important because it could save our butts, is to discover and identify all rocks of dangerous size, that is, larger than 300 m in diameter, that can collide with the Earth and create a planetary disaster to plan some way to avoid it if possible or at least let us know how much time we have left, which is a luxury that non-avian dinosaurs did not have.

But beyond that, detecting and describing the orbits of primitive objects found beyond Neptune will give us answers about the origin and evolution of our own solar system. We will also be able to make a complete catalog of stars of variable brightness and record the intensity changes in their brightness continuously.

We will be able to find out when Supernova explosions happen in neighboring galaxies, which are events so fast that we normally miss them to study them in more detail with other specialized telescopes, that is the most surprising thing, that from now on we are not going to miss anything that happens, because we have this enormous and beautiful eye that sees everything, gossiping every time something interesting happens anywhere in the sky.

Fun fact; There's actually a little bit of sky in the north that this telescope can't see because it's in the southern hemisphere, just to clarify.

Official website

The images without reference were created with AI

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