The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will transform our understanding of the cosmos

With its ability to detect faint objects, Rubin is expected to increase the number of known asteroids and comets by 10 to 100 times. world. It will record 40,000 new small icy bodies 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.

“We’ve never had such a large telescope image so widely and so deeply.”

Anais Möller, Astrophysicist, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

Outside our solar system, Rubin will see distinct twinkles that mark exoplanets passing in front of their parent stars, causing them to briefly dim. It should also discover thousands of new brown dwarfs, faint objects between planets and stars whose locations in the Milky Way could provide insights into how the environment in which stars are born affects the objects that form there. size and type. It will discover never-before-seen faint dwarf galaxies orbiting our own and take a closer look at stellar streams, the stellar remnants left behind when the Milky Way tears apart other similar galaxies.

The facility will also observe far beyond the Milky Way, cataloging some 20 billion previously unknown galaxies and mapping their location in the long filament known as the cosmic web. Dark matter’s gravitational pull directly affects the overall shape of this web, and by examining its structure, cosmologists will gather evidence for different theories of what dark matter is. Rubin expects to observe millions of supernovae and determine their distance from us, a way of measuring how fast the universe is expanding. Some researchers suspect that dark energy, which is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe, may have been more powerful in the past. Data from more distant, older supernovae could help support or refute these ideas and potentially narrow down the extent of dark energy.

The Rubin will be a landmark project by almost every measure, which explains the near-universal eagerness among those in the field to see it finally start working.

“We’ve never had a telescope this big that could image this wide and this deep,” Mueller said. “This is an incredible opportunity to really find out what’s changing in the sky and understand their physics.”

Adam Mann is a freelance space and physics journalist living in Oakland, California.