Named in honor of female astronomer Vera Rubin, whose pioneering work on galaxy rotation provided key evidence for dark matter, the Vera Rubin Observatory uses the world’s largest digital camera to peer at the night sky, looking for dark matter in our universe. What is it? This state-of-the-art facility houses the Simonyi Survey Telescope, which includes a 27.5 foot (8.4 …
Read More »
The alien comet 3I/ATLAS is roughly 7 miles (11.2 kilometers) wide, making it the largest interstellar object ever spotted, according to newly revealed photos from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The detailed images, which were captured before the extrasolar entity was officially discovered, highlight the immense power of the record-breaking telescope and demonstrate how valuable it will be for finding …
Read More »
Every year, all telescopes on Earth and in space combined discover around 20,000 new asteroids. In just its first ten hours of activity, a single new observatory discovered 2,104 asteroids, or in other words, it did 10% of the entire astronomical community’s annual job in less than half a day. Yeah, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the …
Read More »