To the naked eye, the night sky seems like a static and unchanging firmament, with the occasional planet or comet or shooting star visible. <\/p>\n
But with a larger, more sophisticated telescope or camera we are able to discover hundreds of new phenomena every night, from dying stars to near-Earth asteroids. <\/p>\n
The camera that allows this exploration \u2013 attached to a telescope over eight metres wide atop Cerro Pach\u00f3n in Chile \u2013 is the largest in the world<\/a>, weighing almost three tonnes and built over ten years. <\/p>\n The Rubin Observatory\u2019s giant camera can probe the faintest reaches of our existence, capturing light emitted as much as 12 billion years ago. But the Rubin camera will capture new events much closer to our Solar System. <\/p>\n By taking multiple photographs of the sky every night \u2013 and tracking any differences between them, scientists will be able to capture objects moving through space such as the tens of millions of asteroids and comets hurtling through the Solar System. <\/p>\n Outer reaches<\/p>\n Increasing the number of known asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter can help us to understand the formation history of the Solar System. <\/p>\n Beyond Neptune in the faint and distant Kuiper Belt \u2013 a population of icy objects in the outer reaches of the Solar System \u2013 astronomers will be able to study an environment similar to our Solar System in its infancy, to better understand how we came to be. <\/p>\n It has been theorised before that disturbances to the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects indicates the existence of a hypothesised \u201cplanet nine\u201d<\/a> \u2013 Rubin may even be able to build more evidence for this as-yet undiscovered world.<\/p>\n Beyond the solar system, astronomers seek to identify stellar streams of stars leftover from smaller galaxies merging with our own, which help us understand the history of the Milky Way.<\/p>\n What Rubin will capture more than any previous telescope are optical transients \u2013 stars brightening and dimming, and those that eventually explode as a supernova<\/a>. <\/p>\n These explosions produce elements essential to life, from oxygen to iron, and scatter across the universe the materials required for forming stars and planets. <\/p>\n The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will carry out a ten-year survey of the Universe. Capturing more of these supernovae and understanding how they happen is vital for understanding the evolution of the universe. While these are some of the more common \u201cflashes\u201d Rubin will find in its game of spot-the-difference, other rarer objects such as black holes will also be detected and studied to improve our understanding of cosmology. <\/p>\n Some supernovae can be used to determine how far away the galaxy they inhabit is, letting us discover new environments from the earliest years of the universe. Scientists believe that the universe after the Big Bang was uniform in all directions. How then did galaxies form? Astronomers believe the answer lies in small clumps of dark matter<\/a>, which gas and dust gravitated around until galaxies could be born. <\/p>\n![\"Vera](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/file-20260226-71-tymmn.jpg\")
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\n Rubin Observatory<\/a><\/p>\n
\nWhy is it important to capture data about these ancient galaxies? <\/p>\n