Surrounded by the desert mountains and clear blue sky of northern Chile, astronomers from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory hope to revolutionize the study of the universe by affixing the world’s largest-ever digital camera to a telescope.
The size of a small car and weighing 2.8 metric tons, the sophisticated piece of equipment will reveal views of the cosmos as never before, officials from the US-funded project said. Beginning early next year, when the US$800 million camera will snap its first photos, the machine will sweep the sky every three days, allowing scientists to reach new heights in their galactic analyses.
Researchers will be able to go from “studying one star and knowing everything in-depth about that one star, to studying thousands of stars at a time,” said Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Society of Astronomy (Sochias). According to Stuartt Corder, deputy director of NOIRLab, the US research center running the observatory located 2,500 meters up the Cerro Pachon mountain, 560 kilometers north of Santiago, the new facility will usher in “a paradigm shift in astronomy.”
Photo: AFP
The project solidifies Chile’s dominant position in astronomical observation, as the South American country is home to a third of the globe’s most powerful telescopes, according to Sochias, and boasts among the clearest skies on the planet. The Rubin Observatory camera’s first task will be to complete a 10-year review of the sky, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which researchers hope will reveal information about 20 million galaxies, 17 billion stars and six million space objects. The survey will give scientists an up-to-date inventory of images of the solar system, allow them to map our own galaxy, the Milky Way and delve deeper into the study of energy and dark matter.
300TVs FOR ONE PICTURE
The new camera will be able to capture 3,200-megapixel photos — resulting in images so large they would require more than 300 average-size high-definition televisions, lined up together, to view just one. The machine, built in California, will have triple the capacity of the world’s current most powerful camera, the 870-megapixel Hyper Suprime-Cam in Japan, and will have six times the capacity of NOIRLab’s most powerful camera. The lab’s existing top camera, on Chile’s Cerro Tololo mountain, is only 520 megapixels, according to Jacques Sebag, head of construction of the Rubin telescope. Chile’s telescopes have come a long way since the 40-centimeter Cerro Tololo telescope, at the country’s first international observatory, installed in the 1960s.
Photo: AFP
“That telescope arrived here on the back of a mule, because there was no road,” said Stephen Heathcote, director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, only 20 kilometers from Cerro Pachon.
ASTRONOMY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named in honor of the US astronomer who discovered dark matter, will join several other space observation research centers in northern Chile.
Photo: AFP
The natural conditions of the region’s desert landscape — tucked between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountain range — creates the clearest skies on the planet, thanks to a dry climate with little cloud cover. The area plays host to telescopes from more than 30 countries, including some of the most powerful astronomical instruments in the world, such as the radio telescope at the ALMA Observatory and the under-construction Extremely Large Telescope, which by 2027 is set to be able to view never-before-seen reaches of the universe.
Many of humanity’s most important astronomical discoveries have been made at the Cerro Tololo observatory, such as the 2011 Nobel Prize-winning revelation that expansion of the universe is picking up speed, a phenomenon known as cosmic acceleration. Though other influential observatories have been opened around the globe, including in the United States, Australia, China and Spain, “Chile is unbeatable” in the world of astronomy, said Dias, the Sochias president.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS