2025-07-03
38 分钟The Economist.
So what we're doing here right now is basically just taking a series of dark images.
So there's no lights on in the dome.
There's no lights on anywhere.
At the Vera Rubin Observatory in northern Chile,
the astronomers are busy preparing for a major scientific mission.
a 10-year-long time-lapse of the entire night sky.
That decade-long cosmic film will be known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST.
We're kind of getting a sense of the stray light that's coming in to the camera from the closed dome.
So that sound, that whoosh sound, is the camera shutter opening and closing.
Every three to four nights,
the telescope and digital camera will record the entire night sky of the Southern Hemisphere.
The LSST will eventually help astronomers and cosmologists to uncover some of the universe's biggest mysteries.
And everyone I met working on that Chilean mountaintop was excited.
We'll learn a lot about constraining dark matter and dark energy and also understanding trends in astronomy.
I'm mostly excited about the dark matter, of course.
The more of the structure we observe,
the more we can understand how it forms and how it has evolved over time.
I'm interested in measuring star positions and proper motions.
We'll have 20 billion stars, so we'll take it to the next level.