Our physicists are part of one of the most ambitious studies of the Universe ever undertaken.
The NSF-DOE Vera C Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) digital camera will allow our researchers to better understand our cosmic origins.
A massive international collaboration, the LSST, began taking images this week.
It will spend 10 years capturing the entire southern sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse survey of our Universe.
It could solve some of the biggest mysteries of space including the nature of dark energy, and the evolution of our solar system and galaxies, including the Milky Way.
Dark matter and dark energy
Our researchers have been preparing for the LSST for more than a decade and are eagerly anticipating its results.
This includes researchers from our Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Centre for Advanced Instrumentation, Institute for Computational Cosmology and Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology.
It will allow them and our students to study the 3D structure of the Milky Way, see thermonuclear explosions on the surface of white dwarf stars, and spot black holes as they devour stars.
It will also help them to better understand the nature of dark matter - the invisible substance that holds galaxies together - and dark energy - the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
20 billion galaxies
The Vera C Rubin Observatory sits at 2,647 metres above sea level on a mountaintop in Chile.
Across the next decade it will catalogue an estimated 17 billion stars, 20 billion galaxies, and millions of events that change in the sky - more objects than there are living people on Earth.
With the survey expected to create up to 500 petabytes of data in its lifetime, the UK is playing a significant role in the management and processing of this unprecedented dataset.
