The Inquiry

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