Last Wednesday, Oct. 19, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured what they call the "birthplace of stars in the cosmos," a fascinating high-resolution image of dense gas and dust formations filled with bright stars.
The groundbreaking telescope has produced a plethora of fascinating snapshots of the vast star systems in just a few months.
According to reports, equipment of the same magnitude and of greater resolution may take its first images of the sky soon. We are referring to Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera, which is rumored to be the world's largest digital camera in the works.
This ground-breaking technology can image far-off celestial bodies with a 3.2 gigapixel resolution (3.2 billion pixels).
It is said that the Rubin Observatory will progress science in four areas: the nature of dark matter and understanding dark energy, cataloging the Solar System, exploring the changing sky, and the structure and formation of the Milky Way.
More About Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera
At the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, technicians are finishing up work on the largest digital camera in the world, as per NPR. The camera will be shipped to Chile and mounted in April in a telescope in the Andes.
"This camera is huge. It weighs three tons, and it's two stories tall. When I visited earlier this month, it was lying horizontal on a large steel platform," NPR's Joe Palca said.
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The LSST Camera will power the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's telescope, which has been under development for about 20 years but is announced to be nearing completion.
The mechanical components of the complex camera were recently assembled by technicians at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, last September.
What's Next?
Once in position, the camera will take pictures of the entire southern celestial hemisphere, according to Mercury News. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) project, a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, will snap photographs every 15 seconds, amassing a large number of pictures every night over a ten-year period.
It is also reported that when changes in the sky are detected, alerts will be sent out to the entire world within 60 seconds, thanks to specialized computer facilities processing Rubin Observatory data in real-time. All astronomers in the United States, Chile, and Rubin Observatory's in-kind stakeholders will have access to prompt and data-release products.
The Rubin Observatory
According to Wired, the enormous telescope is named after astronomer Vera Rubin. She used telescopes in Arizona in the 1960s and 1970s to map out the spiral arms of stars in nearby galaxies.
Despite being passed over for the Nobel Prize, Rubin's discovery sparked interest in dark matter research. According to the report, it is the first national observatory named after a woman.
Furthermore, Rubin Observatory was the highest-ranked large ground-based project in the 2010 Astrophysics Decadal Survey, according to AURA.
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