Next year, we will begin creating our most detailed map of the visible sky, when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile becomes operational. The information it collects will go beyond previous data sets and is expected to yield significant breakthroughs in astrophysics.
The first star maps can be traced back to the Greek astronomer and mathematician Hipparchus around 129 BC. Although no documentation of his cartography survives to this day, the work he did marked the beginning of a long and important tradition. In 1989, the European Space Agency launched the High-Precision Parallax Collection Satellite (Hipparcos), based on his name. During its three years of operation, it was able to measure with high precision the brightness, position and motion of more than 110,000 stars in our Milky Way. ESA’s next mission, Gaia, launched 24 years later, has increased that number to 2 billion, but its limited size means it can only rival the universe. Next year, the new land-based observatory, named after Vera Rubin – a pioneering astrophysicist of the 20th century – will start operating and it will be capable of seeing much further.
This is because the observatory will be fitted with a large mirror – 8.4 meters in diameter – that will help us detect not only objects in our galaxy that are too faint for Gaia to see, but also Both dim light reaches us from galaxies as far as billions of light years away. Its large field of view means it will be able to image the entire sky above it every few days, after which it will start again. And it will continue to do this for 10 years, creating a series of maps that show the movement of these galaxies through space and time.
This data will help us understand more about the dark energy that makes the universe extend at a greater rate than ever before. It will also be used to probe the nature of dark matter. In the 1970s, it was Rubin who provided the first observational evidence that the universe was much more than the luminous objects we could see. By mapping the positions and motions of stars at the outer edges of galaxies, she showed that the rate at which they orbit their galactic centers is too high for some extra matter. invisible substances provide the additional gravity needed to keep them in orbit. In doing so, she demonstrated the existence of a mysterious substance known as dark matter.
Dark matter makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe — in 2022, the observatory named in Rubin’s honor will help us see how it affects the formation and evolution of stars. galaxies, and even the shape of the universe itself.
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