we are all
in my opinion rightfully excited about
the james webb space telescope launch in
2021
such a powerful space telescope will
allow us to see things
extremely far away with a heretofore
unprecedented fidelity
however there's another telescope also
due to be completed in 2021
that no one is talking about even though
it is the top ranked ground-based
project
in the astrophysics decadal survey of
2010
what is it and what does it do why do
astronomers consider this project to be
quite so important
i'm alex mccolgan and you're watching
astrum and together we will go through
everything you could want to know
about the vera c rubin observatory
very interestingly the rubin observatory
is not connected to a major space agency
funding has actually come from the
united states national science
foundation
and department of energy and the
management is overseen by the
association of universities for research
in astronomy
it's also being built in chile the
location of many eso telescopes
but these aren't connected chile just so
happens to be an amazing place for a
ground-based telescope
with its high mountain range and little
to no cloud cover
this is important because the rubin
observatory's primary goal
is to survey the entire visible sky
every few days
it will do this with its incredible 8.4
meter mirror and 3.2 gigapixel camera
just to give you some perspective the
mirror is the width of a tennis court
and the camera is the largest ever
constructed
it's three meters long and about 1.6
meters wide
the lens of the camera allows the
telescope to view 3.5 degrees of the sky
at the same time
this is a really big area of the sky the
moon and the sun
are only about half a degree across
this camera is also capable of viewing
from the near ultraviolet
to the near infrared wavelengths it does
this with a robotic arm
that changes filters placed in front of
the sensors
you see certain objects or events that
happen in our sky
are brighter in specific wavelengths of
light
but what is the rubin observatory
designed to look at
because it's conducting a sky survey
it's looking out for pretty much
everything its particular science goals
are to look out for
evidence of dark matter and dark energy
mapping small objects
in the solar system particularly near
earth asteroids
as well as larger objects in the kuiper
belt detecting
supernovae in our galaxy and beyond
gamma ray bursts quasar variability
gravitational lensing and lastly it will
map the stars in the milky way
there have been plenty of sky surveys in
the past
notable mentions are the impressive
works done with
gaia pan stars desi
and the sloan digital surveys these have
been extremely useful
in mapping our surroundings with extreme
accuracy
cataloging galaxies stars and asteroids
however the rubin observatory will be
able to see a lot more than any of these
previous surveys
at the end of 10 years of operation it
is expected that data from the rubin
observatory
will allow us to catalog 10 to 100 times
more asteroids larger than 140 meters
than what we currently know about or
around 62 percent
of what probably exists in a near-earth
orbit
with its wide field of view
gravitational wave events that are
detected by ligo
might be visible in an image taken by
the reuben observatory
ligo is also predominantly a national
science foundation project
a very special type of observatory that
uses mirrors
placed four kilometers apart which are
capable of detecting a change
less than one ten thousands the charge
diameter of a proton
these changes can occur as gravitational
waves pass through the facility
the sources of these waves come from
really big events
like neutron stars or black holes
colliding
which creates a ripple in space-time
that propagates outwards from the
location of the event
these events are usually so far away
that by the time they reach
us we need a sensitive observatory like
ligo to even detect them
gravitational waves travel at the speed
of light
so if we detect gravitational waves
there should also be light coming from
the source
with such events we only roughly know
the direction of where it could have
come from
due to the way we detect events with
ligo so to visually see it with a
telescope
time is spent scanning the sky by which
point we may well have missed it
however if you have a telescope capable
of seeing a big
chunk of the sky at the same time with a
super high resolution camera
you can take a lot of photos and search
the data later
to try and locate the event and see if
it was visible
so how will it be able to achieve these
science goals
the telescope will typically observe a
section of the sky for 15 seconds
a 15 second exposure is a compromise
between
being able to see faint objects like
distant stars
and moving objects like asteroids
if you have much more of an exposure you
may see
more faint objects but streaks across
the image will ruin the shots from the
moving object
in order to eliminate the noise from
cosmic rays hitting the camera sensor
two images of the same region will
always be taken
and can then be merged the camera's
images will be
so large that a year's worth of data
will come to about
1.28 petabytes and because the
observatory is located in chile
and the data processing facility is in
the states a special
100 gigabit per second internet
connection had to be specially built
between the two locations
unfortunately though there is a pretty
major problem coming up that the
designers may not have fully envisaged
when in the planning and early
construction phases of this project
any guesses to what would affect a
highly sensitive ground-based telescope
that wasn't such an issue 10 years ago
not pollution not light from cities
but actually the tens of thousands of
cube satellites currently being launched
into space
from the likes of spacex and amazon if a
satellite passes through an
image it will ruin the exposure because
it is so bright compared to the dimmest
objects the telescope is looking for
as a result spacex have committed to
painting their future satellites black
or send them up with a kind of sun shade
to reduce how bright they are
but this certainly won't negate the
problem and in reality
low earth orbit is only going to get
busier
this puts a serious dampener on the
future of highly sensitive ground-based
telescopes
in reality the serious issue here is
that there are currently
no internationally agreed regulations
about what can be put into low earth
orbit
it's the wild west right now and that's
not to mention
how this increases the chances of
kessler syndrome
which i have already done a video about
here if you want to know more
but all in all this is a very exciting
project
and even with these obstacles i'm sure
it will acquire a wealth of valuable
data
perhaps it will even witness events we
have never even conceived possible
before
so there we have it an insight into the
most exciting telescope
that hopefully more people will begin
talking about
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all the best and see you next time