AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Hundreds of parties were held all around the world today as astronomers gathered to watch an event streamed live from Washington, D.C. It was the unveiling of some new pictures of our universe. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory was finally ready for prime time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ZELJKO IVEZIC: This is the first image that we are unveiling...
(APPLAUSE)
IVEZIC: ...To the whole world today.
(APPLAUSE)
CHANG: A screen next to the project leader, Zeljko Ivezic, showed the black sky packed full of galaxies and stars. But then the picture zoomed out to reveal that the image was 50 times bigger, with about 10 million galaxies visible. NPR's science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce joins us now to talk about why giant pictures like this one will transform astronomy. Hi, Nell.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Hey, there. How you doing?
CHANG: Good. OK, so my understanding is that this observatory has, like, the biggest digital camera in the world.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Indeed. It is the size of a car.
CHANG: Oh, wow.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's a 3,200-megapixel camera. And so to display a full image, you really need, like, 400 ultra-high-definition TV screens. There is just so much detail, the human eye and mind can't really take it in. You have to kind of zoom in and out and kind of explore the image piece by piece.
CHANG: That is so cool. OK, so why is that something that astronomers wanted?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's part of an effort to basically capture everything that changes in the sky over time. So instead of pointing a telescope at just one little cosmic object that you know you want to look at, the idea here is that you just take in everything. And that way, you notice stuff happening that you otherwise never would have spotted. And so to do that, you've got this big camera attached to a big telescope. They're perched on a mountaintop in Chile. And the whole observatory is designed to point and shoot super fast...
CHANG: Wow.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: ...So that in a few days, it can cover the entire southern sky.
CHANG: (Laughter).
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And it has these automatic data systems that analyze the pictures and detect anything that changes...
CHANG: Wait.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: ...And sends out alerts to astronomers.
CHANG: Like what? Like, what kinds of changes do scientists hope to see?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Basically anything that goes bump in the night. So...
CHANG: (Laughter).
GREENFIELDBOYCE: ...Anything that moves or changes in brightness - exploding stars, asteroids. They've already discovered over 2,000 new asteroids. They expect to discover millions more. They can see interstellar objects, stuff coming in from solar systems, maybe even another planet in our solar system, like, way off in the distance.
CHANG: Whoa. OK, OK. This telescope is named after Vera Rubin, obviously, who was an astronomer famous for her work on dark matter. Did I get that right?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's right, yeah. So this is the first major publicly funded U.S. astronomy facility to be named after a woman, and...
CHANG: Woo-hoo.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: ...It was built with money from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Lots of groups worked on it. It's been almost 30 years since it was first proposed by this scientist named Tony Tyson. I saw him at the unveiling, and I asked him how he was feeling.
TONY TYSON: I feel amazed because we knew in principle that all of this data will contain that information, but actually seeing it visually blows your mind.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The scale of these images did seem to leave people a little dazed. There was a lot of quiet murmuring. But, you know, it's going to get even bigger and bigger 'cause it's basically going to watch the sky for 10 years, collecting so many images you could basically make, like, a time-lapse movie.
CHANG: That is so cool. And that is NPR's science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce. Thank you so much, Nell.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
