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Scientists have produced the largest digital camera ever for astronomy, weighing 3 tons and with a 1.5-meter lens.
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The LSST camera is designed to capture thousands of 3,200-megapixel images of the entire southern sky.
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A telescope in Chile will use it to study dark energy, dark matter and hazardous asteroids.
The world’s largest digital camera is finally completed lab In Menlo Park, California.
The SUV-sized Legacy Space and Time Survey, or LSST, Camera It weighs approximately 6,200 pounds (about 3 metric tons) and its front lens is more than 1.5 meters wide.
The LSST camera needs to be this big to accomplish its mission of making a 10-year digital survey of the entire southern sky, scanning the entire area every few nights and eventually creating the largest sky ever seen. astronomical movie non-stop.
“Never before has anyone looked at this large a portion of the universe this often,” Aaron Roodman, Rubin Construction’s SLAC deputy manager and camera program leader, told Business Insider.
LSST is not just a fun record-breaking project. Among its groundbreaking scientific goals, the camera can also track large, city-killing asteroids; NASA can identify any space rock that could threaten Earth.
The camera’s weight will also help investigate mysterious dark energy and dark matter Something that fills our universe and baffles scientists.
Scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory fabricated this giant lens over two decades at a cost of approximately $168 million.
It is finally completed and ready to be shipped to the Rubin Observatory in Chile. andes mountains. Engineers plan to install it at the observatory towards the end of this year.
Full sky panorama, but takes 10 years
Photos from the LSST camera will contain 3,200 megapixels.
One megapixel is one million pixels. An ultra-high-definition or 4K TV can only display about 8 megapixels. To display an image from the LSST camera on its screen full resolutionYou’ll need hundreds of ultra HD TVs.
“Their images are so detailed that they can resolve a golf ball from approximately 25 miles away while covering an area of sky seven times larger than the full Moon,” Roodman said. aforementioned in a press release.
LSST is designed to capture approximately 1,000 images each night and combine them to create a single image. highly detailed image every few nights across the entire southern sky. This film, spanning over 10 years and tens of thousands of images, should have what researchers call a 3D movie of the universe.
“This method allows us to observe changes in more than 20 billion galaxies, tracking both their motion and how they change,” Travis Lange, deputy project manager for the SLAC LSST team, said in a video about the project last month..
Due to its diligence, LSST should be able to capture all kinds of cosmic events in real time..
Catching the universe red-handed
Ultra-sensitive space observatories James Webb Space Telescope They have scheduled times to point out specific objects and can’t always make a last-minute turn toward emerging supernovae or interstellar visitors passing through our solar system..
LSST will not need to rotate at all. If something is happening in the southern sky, this giant camera should detect it while surveying the entire area.
This is what the new camera will allow to do Explore the asteroids in our galactic neighborhood It may have flown unnoticed until now.
“We will be able to see smaller things than other telescopes have seen,” Roodman told BI. “And because we’re investigating so quickly, we really expect to see a lot of what’s out there.”
LSST is also designed to alert astronomers when it detects something new or changing in the sky. This gives astronomers a chance to turn their telescopes to observe new supernovae. black hole mergersand other astronomical events in every wavelength of light, collecting the most data ever on these dynamic events.
The survey is also likely to emerge new types of deep space objects and eventssaid Roodman..
Hunting for dark clues
LSST’s ability to track changes in galaxies over decades will also give scientists new insights into how the universe has evolved over time. This is the key to understanding dark energy and dark matter.
“Dark energy” is the name scientists give to the mysterious force that causes dark energy. the universe is expanding faster than ever before. Dark matter is a type of matter that takes up space in space and has mass but does not interact with light.
Dark energy and matter together make up most of the universe, and no one knows what they are. LSST can help you find clues.
“If you look at a galaxy, you can’t say anything. But if you look at hundreds of millions or billions — and we’ll look at billions of galaxies — you can see patterns in the sky,” Roodman said. “You can see the signature of how matter is distributed in the universe.”
Read the original article on Business Insider