This digital camera, the most powerful ever built and in which France participated, will examine the universe and its mysteries by photographing daily a large part of the sky visible from northern Chile.
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A very large camera is on its way to the Andes mountain range. The size of a small car and weighing 2.8 tonnes, the device will be installed on a telescope under construction and will allow the sky to be scanned like never before. It must be installed in the coming days at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named after the American astronomer who discovered dark matter, which is located at an altitude of 2,700 m.
The device will have a 3,200-megapixel digital sensor, and to see one of its images will require more than 300 medium-sized high-definition televisions combined. Once installed on its base under the very pure sky of the Chilean Andes, this LSST camera (Legacy Survey of Space and Time) will have ten years to make the most precise film of the universe within its reach, which it will record night after night with a record resolution of three billion pixels. “The objective is to observe the universe from one’s childhood until today”explains Pierre Antilogus, responsible for the CNRS for the French contribution to this camera, within the IN2P3 laboratory.
“The LSST will not only reconstruct the universe in its entire volume, but also see cataclysmic astrophysical phenomena, supernova explosions, active galactic nuclei or the asteroids of our solar system.”
Pierre Antilogus, CNRSat franceinfo
The other objective for researchers is to better understand two major components of our universe: dark matter and energy. They are invisible to our eyes but whose effects we can observe. “The history of the universe can be summarized in a fight between dark energy which is the engine of the expansion of the universe and dark matter which gravitationally dominates the Universe which tends to slow down its expansionexplains Pierre Antilogus. There remain two big questions today to understand what these components are which represent more than 95% of the content of the universe and about which we know so little.”
Costing around $800 million, the giant camera will begin taking its first images during the first half of 2025.
