The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has started the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, set to create the most detailed record of the universe ever made.
The observatory completed a year of testing and calibration before launching the decade-long project. It will gather around 10 terabytes of data each night through hundreds of high-resolution images.
Each image covers an area roughly 40 times the size of the full moon and focuses on the southern sky. Early alerts from the system have already identified more than 11,000 new asteroids.
Brian Stone of the US National Science Foundation said, “Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made.” The data will support studies of solar system objects, the Milky Way, and distant cosmic phenomena including dark matter and dark energy.
