Note: Adam Miller is Co-Chair of SkAI Pillar 1 (Enhanced Inference from Cosmic Survey Data)
Original URL: https://nos.nl/artikel/2572252-eerste-beelden-nieuwe-telescoop-gaat-dingen-vinden-waarvan-we-bestaan-niet-wisten
By NOS News (NOS News, June 24, 2025)
A mirror the size of a city bus and the most powerful digital camera in the world: the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, high in the mountains of Chile, boasts a list of impressive features. The new American telescope is intended to change our view of the universe, and the first photos are in.
The observatory, named after the American astronomer Vera Rubin, has a resolution of 3200 megapixels, 67 times as much as a new smartphone.
“Rubin turns a seemingly empty piece of space into a glittering spectacle,” the scientists say of one of the first images to be released. Composed of 1100 images, that photo shows a rich collection of 10 million galaxies like our Milky Way.
Over the next ten years, the camera will take about a thousand images of the southern sky night after night and eventually image about 800 times the entire visible sky. The goal is to create a massive dataset with about 40 billion celestial bodies, from stars in the Milky Way to distant galaxies.
This enormous amount of data should ultimately help to explain the mystery of dark matter and dark energy, among other things, where the European space telescope Euclid research on. By better understanding the movements of the galaxies, more should become clear about the role of that material that must be there, but that we cannot directly observe.
“The discoveries could lead to the creation of completely new areas of astronomy,” says Adam Miller of Northwestern University in the US. “It is very likely that the Rubin telescope will find things that no one knows exists.” To read more, see https://nos.nl/artikel/2572252-eerste-beelden-nieuwe-telescoop-gaat-dingen-vinden-waarvan-we-bestaan-niet-wisten
The SkAI Institute is one of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Simons Foundation.
Information on National AI Institutes is available at aiinstitutes.org.
