Brazil, through the Interinstitutional Laboratory of e-Astronomy (Linea), has just signed a scientific cooperation agreement with SLAC, at Stanford University, in the United States, valid until 2038 to guarantee its presence in the project of a super telescope that will have the largest digital camera in the world.
Tests for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) project begin this month and the expectation is that the telescope will be able to produce its first images before the end of September. The promise, which involves an international effort by several countries, is that the equipment will monitor the sky in the Southern Hemisphere every night for ten years and that this will provide the international scientific community with information to help them understand mysteries about space.
Brazil will participate in the collaboration by sending 120 scientists, 80% of whom will be young researchers. There are 26 educational institutions from 12 different states sending representatives to the BPG-LSST, the name given to the Brazilian collective that will work on the project. Brazil will be responsible for managing a data center to store and process the information generated by the super telescope, which also includes creating Big Data software specifically for this operation.
“Everything that moves or explodes in the Universe will be detected. Among other things, the project will conduct a complete census of the Solar System, without precedent. It is a transformative project, an opportunity to be part of one of the greatest scientific experiments in history, a journey into the unknown with high technology, unparalleled for Brazilian science, with a transversal impact on many areas of knowledge,” said astrophysicist Luiz Nicolaci da Costa, director of Linea.
What is the LSST super telescope?
The super telescope will be located at the Rubin Observatory, which is being built on Cerro Pachón in the Coquimbo region of Chile. The project has set two Guinness World Records, with the highest resolution and the largest optical lens on Earth. The telescope will have a resolution of 3.2 gigapixels and the lens will be 1.57 meters in diameter.
With the help of the LSST telescope, which will be over 8 meters long, the observatory will produce 20 terabytes of data every night for 10 years.
To achieve this feat, it will gather millions of high-resolution images of star clusters, which can be assembled by scientists and will help expand the volume of galaxies that can be seen and therefore studied by humanity.
The observatory is named after astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who dedicated her academic life to proving that there is invisible matter in the Universe. Through her studies, scientists discovered that more than 80% of the matter in the universe is invisible.
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This content was originally published in Brazil guarantees presence in supertelescope project with the largest camera in the world on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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