Some scientists are convinced that beyond Neptune, there's a planet they've yet to see. This so-called "Planet 9" is so far away, it would be a faint object. The stretch of sky researchers would have to search is huge. But a new astronomical facility on a mountaintop in Chile could help tackle the search. The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been under construction for years. Now, scientists are finetuning its instruments so the telescope can begin its 10-year mission of taking images of almost the entire southern sky. Read more of science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce's reporting here.Want to hear more stories about the mysteries of space? Email us and let us know at [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory?
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Chapter 2: How does the telescope differ from traditional telescopes?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here, and today we're going to talk about a powerful, highly unusual telescope that's just now starting up. Most telescopes are designed to point at a particular object in the sky, maybe a certain galaxy or planet or star, so that astronomers can study it in detail.
Then it moves on to the next galaxy or another star, and it does it all over again.
So that's not what this telescope is doing, right? Okay, this is a survey telescope. It means it's almost scanning the entire sky. Hey, Nell. Hey.
Chapter 3: What groundbreaking technology does the observatory use?
That's NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfield-Boyce, everyone. She's here to tell us about the awesome power of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
So this thing is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, along with other sources. And it's on a mountaintop in Chile where scientists are currently fine tuning its instruments, which are all finally installed. And this is basically an enormous telescope equipped with the world's biggest digital camera. It's the size of a car. It is enormous.
And this camera will be taking images of almost the whole southern sky. And it's going to do this continuously for like 10 years. So that means every few nights, it's going to cover the whole southern sky... taking in everything.
That's so many images. So like you could basically make like a movie out of this, like the entire night sky, like how it changes over time, which is new.
It is truly unprecedented. I was talking with Bob Blum. He's director of operations for the observatory.
Sometime through the first year of this 10-year survey, we'll have already observed more things than astronomers have ever observed before.
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Chapter 4: How will the observatory help in the search for Planet 9?
He means ever as in like ever through all of history.
Wow. I mean, that really boggles my mind. It's like really an astonishing amount of data.
It truly is. It truly is. And part of what makes this observatory special is the way it's going to analyze all this data in real time. So basically, it compares images with each other, you know, the newest images with the images it took before. to detect anything that brightens or moves or changes.
So that means it can catch anything that goes bump in the night that astronomers couldn't see before because they weren't just looking in the right spot.
Including possibly another large planet in our solar system, right? Because my understanding is that this observatory is the best chance of finding the elusive so-called Planet 9. Right.
You know it. So it is looking like the moment of truth for this much ballyhooed possible planet, if it's even there.
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Chapter 5: What was the inspiration behind building the Rubin Observatory?
So today on the show, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. What happens when big data comes to astronomy and why its telescope has the best chance of finding another planet in our solar system. Plus, what else this radical observatory might see. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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All right, now, the Rubin Observatory has been in the works for decades. Like, tell me how this idea came about.
Okay, so get in your time machine. Go back to 1996. You may recall the hit song that year was the Macarena.
Yep, everyone was dancing it. And the president was Bill Clinton. Yeah, I was in high school. I was watching a lot of Simpsons. I was playing the saxophone like Lisa and former President Clinton. Indeed.
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Chapter 6: What challenges were faced in the telescope's development?
Indeed. So there was this scientist named Tony Tyson, and he had created then what was the world's largest digital camera at the time. And so his group had been invited to hook this camera up to a telescope. And so they were just sitting there together in the telescope's control room, taking images of the dark sky.
Three o'clock in the morning. And I said, you know, we can do better.
He was like, in principle, we could make a camera that's even bigger. I mean, he knew the silicon fabrication technology that he would need to do. It was rapidly improving. And so was the computing power.
Wow. OK, so, I mean, that's right. Like Moore's law, the computer chips were getting like more and more powerful.
Exactly. And so he was like, in principle, we could build this enormous camera. We could put it on a very big telescope and just like collect a ton of data and then mine all that data using computing technologies that didn't even exist back then, but that he knew were definitely coming.
So I decided that that was going to be the goal. And I guess the rest is history.
He started trying to drum up support, which you got to do if you want to build a big telescope. And, you know, a couple of years later in 1998, someone reminded him that there was this consensus panel meeting. So astronomy has these consensus panels. They meet every 10 years at the National Academies. And they set the community's major goals for the future and kind of set priorities.
And so it was last minute. But he, you know, decided to pitch this idea.
So I put together a 50 page proposal. Slipped it under the door and they loved it. They thought it was an interesting idea. They didn't rank it first, but they thought it was a really cool idea. But they didn't like the name.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the name change from Dark Matter Telescope?
Yeah, I did not know it. But how did this observatory come to be named after like Vera Rubin, the astronomer that's like famous for work on dark matter?
So that happened later in 2019. So, you know, Vera Rubin had died without winning a Nobel, which many people thought was a real shame. And anyway, they figured they could name this after her. And it's the first U.S. National Observatory ever named after a woman. That's awesome. Anyway, it did take time to get the funding for this.
I mean, some of it came from other sources like Microsoft gurus Bill Gates and Charles Simone. Actually, the telescope is named after Charles Simone. The telescope part of it is. But anyway, they were interested in these big data aspects of the project. And then it took a lot of time to build it. I mean, but it's all been coming together in Chile on this mountaintop.
The huge camera is installed and light from the sky is finally shining down into it through the telescope.
Chapter 8: What does 'synoptic' mean in the context of astronomy?
Wow.
All the fine-tuning of instruments is finally happening, and the first images are expected to be made public soon, like within weeks.
Wow, and that's because of this big camera, that car-sized one. Yeah. And I'm assuming these images are really big.
So the observatory says in its little fact sheets that displaying one at full size would take about 400 ultra-high-definition televisions. Wow. So that's like one image. I was talking to Sandrine Thomas. She's one of the project's scientists and a deputy director of construction at She says this telescope is more compact and rigid than other large telescopes, and that reduces the vibrations.
What that means is that we can move it very quickly and it can stabilize very quickly. Oh, OK. So you can point and shoot.
And all that pointing and shooting gets controlled by the observatory's automatic system. So it's not like human controllers.
And the reason is we have to change position in the sky every 36 seconds. And so your brain and your typing is not fast enough to do that.
I mean, Nell, this is just like a mind bending amount of observations. And you said it's all like being immediately analyzed. And I'm assuming this is like all automatic, too.
Yeah, so basically they have computer systems that are set up to compare new images to the ones that the telescope previously took. And so that means they're able to see if anything has changed, if there's anything new, like say an asteroid has just flown by or whatever.
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