New Telescope Captures The Cosmos In Groundbreaking Detail

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, Flora Lichtman here. And you are listening to Science Friday.

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Today in the podcast, a dazzling new glimpse of the universe.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Just the number of stars that are in those images just keeps blowing my mind over and over again every time I open them up.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: In breaking space news, the very first images from the brand new Vera C Rubin Observatory have been unveiled. This massive telescope sits high atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes. And it’s equipped with the largest digital camera on the planet. It is producing cosmic glam shots that are giving us a brand new view of the universe.

Here with the details is Dr. Federica Bianco, an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware and the deputy project scientist for the Vera C Rubin Observatory. Welcome to Science Friday.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Thank you. I’m very excited to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s nice to have something to celebrate.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Indeed. And it’s been a long way. We’ve been building this observatory for upwards of 20 years. I have personally been involved for upwards of 10. So yeah, a long way.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is it like graduation day? What does it feel like?

FEDERICA BIANCO: Is it like graduation day? Yeah, maybe. I think I’m still processing it. I’m still digesting it. And part of it is because the images look so good, that maybe they don’t really even look real to my eyes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, are they better than you expected?

FEDERICA BIANCO: I think so, yes, they are.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

FEDERICA BIANCO: I think they’re more sensational. The gradient of colors that we see is just mind blowing. The number, just the number of stars that are in those images just keeps blowing my mind over and over again every time I open them up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I can hear it in your voice. But translate it for us non-astronomers. Why is this such a big deal? Why is this so exciting?

FEDERICA BIANCO: Yeah, so this survey is really a significant step above anything else that has been done before. Over the course of 10 years, we will look at as much of the sky that you can see from an observatory that is on the ground with its feet on Earth. That’s half of the sky that is accessible, in fact, a little bit more.

And we look at it over and over again. Eventually, we’ll have 800 images for every position in the Southern Hemisphere sky. And in addition, we’ll have a few areas that will be observed with 10 times as many images, even. We’ll be able to see the things that change on short time scales from hours, days, and on long time scales, a whole decade.

So all of the things in the sky that look so static to our eyes, we build this idea of a reliable, never-changing sky. It’s a theme across cultures in the mythology of humans. But it couldn’t be far from the truth.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So this is like a time lapse of the sky.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Yeah, we like to call it a cosmic movie.

FLORA LICHTMAN: A cosmic movie. Well, that’s a better word. That is better branding. OK, but what does change? This is kind of shaking my conception of the night sky. So what are the kinds of changes that you expect to See or what are you looking for?

FEDERICA BIANCO: Until maybe the early 1900s, we just did not know that most things in the sky change. We had seen that some stars change, their brightness, maybe their color. But the majority of the things look like they were not evolving because they evolve on timescales that are typically longer than the life of a human.

But if you look farther away, and you look at more and more things, you catch these stars when they die. And when they die, they die suddenly and explosively in most cases. That’s one of the things that we will see many, many more than ever before. Supernova, that’s the technical word.

But until the early 1900s, we could see maybe one a century, because that’s, roughly speaking, the rate at which that happens inside of a typical galaxy. One star explodes every 100 years, very roughly. But now we can look at billions of galaxies. So we can see this happening all around us all the time.

FLORA LICHTMAN: A lot’s going to be popping off.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Yes. And that’s only one of the things. There’s stars that get eaten up by the black holes in the center of galaxies. And that produces some delightful cosmic fireworks. There’s stars that merge. Probably most people have heard of the fact that we can now detect gravitational waves. In some cases, those come from stars that collide and merge. And that also produces an electromagnetic signature, so fireworks that we can detect and see with our telescopes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow, so it’s gonna give you some insight into some of the biggest questions that we’re wondering about, dark matter, dark energy?

FEDERICA BIANCO: Indeed. Those are some of the huge questions, some of the most well-known mysteries of our understanding of the universe. Rubin Observatory is designed with the goal, among others, to really shed some light on these dark sector components, dark energy and dark matter.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so the telescope took a couple decades to build. Can you give us a picture of it? And how does it work? I’ve been hearing it’s the biggest digital camera on the planet. I want to know more.

FEDERICA BIANCO: So I used to say, oh, it’s like a small European car. And then I was in Greece for a conference just two weeks ago. And I rented a small European car. And I forgot how small they get. I had a feeling–

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s much bigger than a small European car.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Much bigger. It’s more like an American size car. yes, indeed. So it’s the largest camera ever built. It’s on the Guinness World Record already. It’s physically large. It has a lot of pixels, 3.2 gigapixel, so three billion pixels in every image that we take.

One way to relate to this, perhaps, is to think about The Sphere in Las Vegas, which probably many people have heard of is this great enormous screen, the largest screen in the world. U2 was in residence at The Sphere. But they’re not big enough to show a single one of our images at full resolution. They can only show a fraction of one. That’s how big our images are.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to talk about some of the images that were released. There’s one that I feel like I’ve seen everywhere. It is massive. It’s just like you can’t– there’s just speckles everywhere. You just can’t believe how much is going on in them. Sparkly glowing orbs, different colors, little blue shining things, little red shining things. Will you describe it better than I just did, please?

FEDERICA BIANCO: I think that was fantastic. But yeah, so you’re looking at the Virgo cluster. And you’re looking at a region of roughly five full fields of view of Rubin Observatory. That’s a very large chunk of the sky. You can see all sorts of things there. You can see galaxies. You can see stars. We have an app. It’s called the Sky Viewer, which we built to enable this experience through our images.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m going to open it up. And maybe we can look at it together. It’s skyviewer.app, right?

FEDERICA BIANCO: Yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so I’m going to turn it on. I’m in the picture. And I’m actually– I’m not just– I’m not just seeing things. I’m actually hearing things. There’s a sonic component.

FEDERICA BIANCO: We’re so proud of that.

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Obviously, astronomy is a very visual science. But that’s not the only way that you can absorb information and you can extract data. And also, we want people that may not be sighted to be able to experience our data and to do science with our data.

So think about an astrophysical image. There’s going to be some galaxies. Those are diffuse, large. You see a blob of light. There’s going to be some stars. Those are going to be little dots and points. And they’re going to be different colors. And they’re going to be different shapes.

As the cursor, as the target moves around, different stars enter that circle. And those stars are sonified in different ways at different pitches depending on the brightness and the color.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And you know what? When I zoom out–

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–my circle, of course, has a bigger field of view. And it’s just like the twinkling. It’s like wind chimes on 11.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Exactly, yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And if I zoom in, it gets sparser and sparser because I’m only seeing a star here and there.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Exactly. And this is a different way of interacting with the data.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That is so cool. This telescope took decades of investment, international collaboration. Honestly, in some ways, it feels like a project out of a different time, maybe even a different universe. Given the cuts that we are seeing to science today, how do you make sense of these two things together?

FEDERICA BIANCO: Oh, this is a difficult question, of course, without speculating learning about what might happen. This was a very significant investment by the national agencies, the NSF and DOE. It was a significant investment, which they made because this was deemed a priority by the scientific community to build an observatory that could do this.

And obviously, I personally think that was an excellent idea. And one of the aspects for which I think that was an excellent idea is because I truly believe that this observatory can build a legacy data set for humanity. Our data is available to anybody in the US and Chile immediately.

After two years, the data becomes public worldwide. The alerts, the thing that tell you about things that change in the night sky that are released in real time are worldwide accessible, no proprietary period from the start. This will be a data set that will capture how the sky looks now before we modify it too much, with human made satellites zooming around it.

And we’ll immortalize it in a way that has not been done before. We have great expectation that this data set will help us answer some key questions about how the universe works, about maybe our place in the universe, but will also really capture the imagination of generations and will get us to ask more questions.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is there anything you’re particularly interested? Any secrets you really want uncovered?

FEDERICA BIANCO: The secrets that– I want to be surprised. The thing that I want is a surprise for me. I know there’s going to be many things that are probably going to be surprising about stellar mergers, about stellar disruptions by black holes, stellar flares. But I want us to detect something that we really don’t understand how it works and that doesn’t fit in the way in which we think physics works.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I hope you get your wish. And I suspect you will, because that is always the story of science, I feel like, especially when it comes to the cosmos.

FEDERICA BIANCO: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Federica Bianco is an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware and the deputy project scientist for the Vera C Rubin Observatory. To see the images we talked about and explore yourself, head to sciencefriday.com/skyview.

Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to rate and review us if you like the show. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We’d love to hear from you. Today’s episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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