On Monday, people around the world, including at Penn State, got a first look at pictures and videos from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
About 50 people, including graduate students and professors, packed into a classroom on the University Park campus to watch the live stream from Washington D.C.
People in the room gasped at learning the massive size of the images and videos from the Rubin Observatory.
Niel Brandt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, explained how Rubin is different from other telescopes.
“Each image gathered by this thing covers about 3,000 times the sky area of the Hubble Space Telescope or of, say, the James Webb Space Telescope," Brandt said.
Brandt is one of thousands of scientists who helped create the observatory. He’s been involved with the project since 2005, and is still on the observatory’s advisory committee.
“We aim to actually go in and make many of the scientific discoveries with the data flowing from this observatory," Brandt said.
Larry Ramsey, professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, was also part of the original team back in the early 2000’s to create the Rubin Observatory, which is a joint project between the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
“It's very gratifying to see this happen," Ramsey said. "I just hope that we maintain enough funding in science that the U.S. can use it."
Ramsey and Brandt said they worry about potential future cuts to science research, which could make it difficult to study the flood of data from Rubin. Even with those challenges, Penn State has already hired one person to help research data from the Rubin Observatory and might hire more.
Scientists hope the data from this observatory will lead to many scientific discoveries, including finding more information about dark matter and dark energy, asteroids and supernova explosions.
Here's a video shared during Monday's Rubin Observatory "first look" live stream event:
