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What is Rubin Observatory?

Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a brand new astronomical facility on top of Cerro Pachón, a mountain in Northern Chile. Rubin Observatory will conduct a ten-year survey of the Southern Hemisphere sky (referred to as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST) with the goal of answering some of scientists' biggest questions about the Universe.

Every night for a decade, Rubin Observatory will take images of the sky using a 3200 megapixel camera and six different optical filters. Each image covers an area as big as 40 full moons, and the giant 8.4-meter telescope can move between different positions in less than five seconds. In this way, the telescope will image the entire visible sky every 3-4 nights. This makes Rubin Observatory particularly good at detecting objects that have changed in brightness, like supernovae, or in position, like asteroids. Additionally, Rubin Observatory’s light-collecting power and sensitive camera will help us discover about 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars.