The most powerful digital camera ever built has released its first pictures of the universe.
Beautiful galaxies shine in the images that show a vast picture of colourful nebulae and stars.
They come from the Vera C Rubin Observatory, which hopes to be able to continuously monitor the night sky with a view to better understanding the universe and its processes. By watching all the time, scientists hope to be able to create something like a rewindable video of the cosmos.
Scientists hope that it can eventually be used to better understand asteroids, find the nature of mysterious dark matter and more. It takes its name from the astronomer whose work offered the first hints of the existence of dark matter.
The first images are really intended to show the profound detail of the pictures, however. The camera has 3,200 megapixels – around 70 times that of the latest iPhone – making it precise enough to show a golf ball on the Moon.
Scientists hope that detail will allow them to peer deep into the universe.
“The beautiful galaxies in the foreground of this image all live in our immediate cosmic neighbourhood,” said Benjamin Joachimi, from UCL’s Department of Physics & Astronomy.
“We are much more excited about the many unassuming small blobs of light filling the background: most of these are also galaxies, just much further away from Earth. Together, they trace the large-scale distribution of matter in the Universe, which is shaped by the properties of dark matter and dark energy.”