First Images From World's Largest Digital Camera Reveal Galaxies and Cosmic Collisions
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First images from world's largest digital camera reveal galaxies and cosmic collisions:
Millions of stars and galaxies fill a dreamy cosmic landscape in the first-ever images released from a new astronomical observatory with the largest digital camera in the world.
In one composite released Monday, bright pink clouds of gas and dust light up the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, located several thousand light-years away from Earth. In another, a bonanza of stars and galaxies fills the sky, revealing stunning spirals and even a trio of galaxies merging and colliding.
A separate video uncovered a swarm of new asteroids, including 2,104 never-before-seen space rocks in our solar system and seven near-Earth asteroids that pose no danger to the planet.
The images and videos from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory represented just over 10 hours of test observations and were sneak peeks ahead of an event Monday that was livestreamed from Washington, D.C.
Keith Bechtol, an associate professor in the physics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been involved with the Rubin Observatory for nearly a decade, is the project's system verification and validation scientist, making sure the observatory's various components are functioning properly.
He said teams were floored when the images streamed in from the camera.
"There were moments in the control room where it was just silence, and all the engineers and all the scientists were just seeing these images, and you could just see more and more details in the stars and the galaxies," Bechtol told NBC News. "It was one thing to understand at an intellectual level, but then on this emotional level, we realized basically in real time that we were doing something that was really spectacular."
In one of the newly released images, the Rubin Observatory was able to spot objects in our cosmic neighborhood - asteroids in our solar system and stars in the Milky Way - alongside far more distant galaxies that are billions of light-years away.
"In fact, for most of the objects that you see in these images, we're seeing light that was emitted before the formation of our solar system," Bechtol said. "We are seeing light from across billions of years of cosmic history. And many of these galaxies have never been seen before."
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