
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
In Chile, a powerful new telescope has just given a taster of what we can expect from it later this year, when it will be used to survey the cosmos over a ten-year period. In one image it revealed vast colourful gas and dust clouds swirling in a star-forming region 9,000 light years from the Earth.
Housed in the Vera C Rubin Observatory, which sits on a mountain in the Chilean Andes, the telescope is designed to get giant images of the sky about one hundred times larger and quicker than any other existing telescope can achieve. It contains the world’s most largest digital camera, the size of a large car.
When the Legacy Survey of Space and Time begins towards the end of 2025, the camera will film the entire Southern hemisphere night sky for the next decade, every three days, repeating the process over and over. And it will focus on four areas: mapping changes in the skies or transient objects, the formation of the Milky Way, mapping the Solar System and understanding dark matter or how the universe formed.
So, on this week’s Inquiry, we’re asking, ‘What will Chile’s latest telescope tell us about the Universe?’
Contributors:
Presenter: Charmaine Cozier
Image Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images
4.6
693693 ratings
In Chile, a powerful new telescope has just given a taster of what we can expect from it later this year, when it will be used to survey the cosmos over a ten-year period. In one image it revealed vast colourful gas and dust clouds swirling in a star-forming region 9,000 light years from the Earth.
Housed in the Vera C Rubin Observatory, which sits on a mountain in the Chilean Andes, the telescope is designed to get giant images of the sky about one hundred times larger and quicker than any other existing telescope can achieve. It contains the world’s most largest digital camera, the size of a large car.
When the Legacy Survey of Space and Time begins towards the end of 2025, the camera will film the entire Southern hemisphere night sky for the next decade, every three days, repeating the process over and over. And it will focus on four areas: mapping changes in the skies or transient objects, the formation of the Milky Way, mapping the Solar System and understanding dark matter or how the universe formed.
So, on this week’s Inquiry, we’re asking, ‘What will Chile’s latest telescope tell us about the Universe?’
Contributors:
Presenter: Charmaine Cozier
Image Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images
5,456 Listeners
364 Listeners
1,801 Listeners
7,647 Listeners
527 Listeners
891 Listeners
962 Listeners
290 Listeners
965 Listeners
1,046 Listeners
232 Listeners
362 Listeners
841 Listeners
594 Listeners
358 Listeners
404 Listeners
86 Listeners
478 Listeners
633 Listeners
365 Listeners
974 Listeners
323 Listeners
3,007 Listeners
91 Listeners
596 Listeners
1,000 Listeners
522 Listeners
607 Listeners
24 Listeners
121 Listeners
269 Listeners
27 Listeners
86 Listeners
4 Listeners