Chile's Vera Rubin Observatory reveals stunning first photos

DW (English)

Astronomers using the largest digital camera ever built have released its first images of the universe, including colorful nebulae, stars and galaxies.

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00:00It's an unprecedented view of the universe, with distant galaxies, asteroids, and colorful clouds of celestial dust.

00:09Among the debut images released by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile

00:14is a composite photo of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, located thousands of light-years away from Earth.

00:21Another image shows the Virgo Cluster, which comprises up to 2,000 galaxies.

00:27These galaxies indicate to us that a galaxy is older, is at a later stage in its evolution, and they look like our Milky Way.

00:40So these indicate to us what our galaxy looked like in previous years, and it can develop our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve.

00:52The images were captured using a groundbreaking telescope and the world's largest digital camera weighing 3,000 kilograms.

01:01More than two decades in the making, the giant U.S.-funded observatory sits on a mountaintop in Chile's sprawling Atacama Desert,

01:09where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos.

01:14Whenever we look at the universe in a new way, we always discover something that we've never thought about before,

01:22and that's what we're super excited about, that completely new dimension of looking at the universe,

01:29not just through space, but also how it's changing through time.

01:32Later this year, the observatory will begin its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

01:39Over the next decade, it'll take photographs of the night sky every few seconds with unmatched detail.

01:46Experts hope the project will answer some of the enduring questions about the structure and fate of the universe.

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