
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
5,426 Listeners
369 Listeners
1,807 Listeners
7,657 Listeners
519 Listeners
345 Listeners
897 Listeners
971 Listeners
289 Listeners
959 Listeners
1,041 Listeners
239 Listeners
367 Listeners
831 Listeners
587 Listeners
353 Listeners
398 Listeners
82 Listeners
476 Listeners
648 Listeners
370 Listeners
319 Listeners
2,988 Listeners
68 Listeners
621 Listeners
1,002 Listeners
548 Listeners
611 Listeners
25 Listeners
142 Listeners
283 Listeners
25 Listeners
69 Listeners
4 Listeners