ESA, NASA, K. SHARON/Tel Aviv University, E. OFEK/California Institute of Technology
Rubin’s ability to detect faint objects is expected to increase the number of known asteroids and comets by a factor of 10 to 100. Many of these objects are over 140 meters in diameter and their orbits pass close to Earth, making them potentially threatening. our world. And it catalogs 40,000 new small icy objects in the Kuiper Belt, a largely unexplored region beyond Neptune where many comets are born, helping scientists better understand the structure and history of the solar system. Probably.
“I’ve never photographed so wide and so deeply with a telescope this big.”
Anais Mellor, astrophysicist, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
Outside our solar system, Rubin sees telltale flickers that signal exoplanets passing in front of their parent stars, causing them to temporarily dim. In addition, thousands of new brown dwarfs, which are faint objects with a size between planets and stars, are expected to be discovered. This may provide insight into how this affects pod type. It discovered a never-before-seen dim dwarf galaxy orbiting our own galaxy and detailed star streams, the traces of stars left behind when the Milky Way tore apart other similar galaxies. will observe.
The facility will also look far beyond the Milky Way, cataloging some 20 billion previously unknown galaxies and elucidating their arrangement in a long filament-like structure known as the cosmic web. It is planned to be mapped. The gravitational pull of dark matter directly influences the overall shape of this web, and by examining its structure, cosmologists will gather evidence for various theories about what dark matter is. Rubin is expected to observe millions of supernovae and measure their distance from us as a way to measure how fast the universe is expanding. Some researchers suspect that the dark energy causing the accelerated expansion of the universe may have been stronger in the past. Data from more distant, and therefore older, supernovae could help confirm or disprove such ideas, and potentially also narrow down the identity of dark energy.
spencer lowell
In every sense of the word, Rubin will be a monumental project. This explains the near-universal enthusiasm for seeing it finally put into operation by those on the ground.
“Never before have we taken such wide and deep images with such a large telescope,” Mellor said. “This is a great opportunity to pinpoint what is changing in the sky and understand its physics.”
Adam Mann is a freelance astrophysics journalist living in Oakland, California.