Different observatories, just like the Hubble House Telescope and the James Webb House Telescope, have already begun stitching collectively this map from their photos of galaxies. However Rubin plans to take action with distinctive precision and scale, analyzing the shapes of billions of galaxies quite than the tons of of tens of millions that present telescopes observe, in line with Andrés Alejandro Plazas Malagón, Rubin operations scientist at SLAC Nationwide Laboratory. “We’re going to have the widest galaxy survey to this point,” Plazas Malagón says.
Capturing the cosmos in such excessive definition requires Rubin’s 3.2-billion-pixel Giant Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST boasts the most important focal aircraft ever constructed for astronomy, granting it entry to giant patches of the sky.
The telescope can also be designed to reorient its gaze each 34 seconds, which means astronomers will have the ability to scan the whole sky each three nights. The LSST will revisit every galaxy about 800 instances all through its tenure, says Steven Ritz, a Rubin venture scientist on the College of California, Santa Cruz. The repeat exposures will let Rubin group members extra exactly measure how the galaxies are distorted, refining their map of darkish matter’s internet. “We’re going to see these galaxies deeply and often,” Ritz says. “That’s the ability of Rubin: the sheer grasp of with the ability to see the universe intimately and on repeat.”
The final word aim is to overlay this map on completely different fashions of darkish matter and look at the outcomes. The main concept, the chilly darkish matter mannequin, means that darkish matter strikes slowly in comparison with the velocity of sunshine and interacts with bizarre matter solely by gravity. Different fashions counsel completely different habits. Every comes with its personal image of how darkish matter ought to clump in halos surrounding galaxies. By plotting its chart of darkish matter towards what these fashions predict, Rubin would possibly exclude some theories and favor others.
A cosmic tug of struggle
If darkish matter lies on one facet of a magnet, pulling matter collectively, you then’ll flip it over to seek out darkish vitality, pushing it aside. “You possibly can consider it as a cosmic tug of struggle,” Plazas Malagón says.
Darkish vitality was found within the late Nineteen Nineties, when astronomers discovered that the universe was not solely increasing, however doing so at an accelerating fee, with galaxies transferring away from each other at larger and better speeds.
