“We don’t understand 95% of our universe. That’s sort of mind-boggling.”
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first image on June 23, showing 10 million galaxies captured by a 3.2 billion pixel camera that weighs as much as an SUV. Over ten years it will photograph roughly 20 billion galaxies to map dark matter and dark energy. Tony Tyson, now 85, pioneered the weak gravitational lensing techniques that made the whole thing possible back in the 1980s. This is what happens when you let scientists build something for decades instead of demanding quarterly returns.