# The FIRST images from the RUBIN observatory! ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Dr. Becky - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVcG8TZ8Wg - **Дата:** 03.07.2025 - **Длительность:** 19:39 - **Просмотры:** 344,140 ## Описание AD - To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/DrBecky and you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription | Us astronomers and astrophysicists have been waiting for this moment for a LONG time: the first images from the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile were released this month and they are unlike anything we’ve seen before. First proposed back in 2001, and after 15 years of construction, this is a telescope that is now set to image the entire sky every 3 nights: if anything moves, changes, or flares in the sky, we will spot it with Rubin’s 8.4m telescope. Rubin is one of the most ambitious astronomy projects we’ve ever seen, not because of its size, but because of the sheer scale of what its going to attempt to do: image the entire sky every 3 nights for 10 years, slowly collecting more light to detect ever fainter objects. Its estimated that it will detect 20 billion objects in the sky over those 10 years, and flag 10 million things that change in the sky after each 3 day pass. In 10 years of operations, it will collect around 60 petabytes of data. But today I want to chat about these first images released from just 7 days of observing (that give us a taste of what we can expect over the next 10 years), detecting 2000 asteroids in just that tiny patch of sky in a short space of time! Rubin DP1 research paper - https://rtn-095.lsst.io/ Rubin Skyviewer App - https://skyviewer.app/ Download the first images for yourself - https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery/collections/first-look-gallery My previous video on Rubin - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3N-DjVXh44 Rubin Comet Catchers project - https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/orionnau/rubin-comet-catchers Galaxy Zoo project - https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/ 00:00 Introduction 02:21 What makes the Rubin images different from previous surveys of the sky? 08:12 Why do the stars look weird? Rainbow spikes & red circles 13:48 Wow that’s a lot of asteroids 19:05 Bloopers Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing --- 📚 My new book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My new merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVcG8TZ8Wg) Introduction Us astronomers and astrophysicists have been waiting for this moment for a long time. The first images from the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile were released this month and they are unlike anything we've seen before. First proposed back in 2001 and after 15 years of construction, this is a telescope that is now set to image the entire sky every three nights. So that anything that moves, changes or flares on the sky, we will spot with Reubin's 8. 4 meter telescope. Now Reuben is one of the most ambitious astronomy projects that we have ever seen. Not because of the telescope size. There are telescopes in construction right now that are far bigger at 40 m across. With Rubin, it's about the sheer scale of what it's going to attempt to do. Survey the entire sky every three nights for 10 years, slowly collecting more light from each part of the sky to detect fainter objects. It's estimated that in those 10 years, it is going to detect 20 billion different objects and flag 10 million things that change in the sky with every three night pass. In its 10 years of operations, it's going to collect 60 pabytes of data, which for context is 1,500 times bigger than Amazon's entire database or 1 million times larger than all the data on Wikipedia. If you want to know more about Reuben and just the general scientific goals of this project, you can check out my previous video which went into all of that detail. But today, I want to chat about these first images that have been released that were collected over just 7 days of observations, giving us a taste of what we can expect over the next 10 years. It even detected 4,000 asteroids in just this tiny patch of sky that's been imaged in such a short space of time as well. It really is incredible. So, in this video, we're going to dive in and chat first about how these images from Reuben are different from other survey images we've had before. Then, we're going to chat about what's with the weird looking stars in these images. And then finally chat about the insane number of asteroids that it's managed to detect. Or just to give you a bit of an insight into, you know, what me and my colleagues are excited for when it comes to these Reuben images. You know what we've been chatting about over coffee in the past week or so. So, let's start ### [2:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVcG8TZ8Wg&t=141s) What makes the Rubin images different from previous surveys of the sky? with how these images from Reuben are different from other survey images we've had before. like the Sloan digital sky survey for example which 20 years ago did a full scan of the entire northern hemisphere sky detecting over 1 million galaxies and it has had a huge lasting impact on astrophysics in that time frame. The first port of call for so many of us when it comes to needing observations of an object is to first check what did Sloan see and then we go from there. So if we already had a survey of the sky with Sloan then why did we need Reuben? Well, the easiest way to explain this is to just show you. Here's the Sloan image of this patch of sky in the Virgo cluster. Compare that then to what Reuben saw in just 10 total hours of observation time. The change in the level of detail here is just staggering. Now, putting aside the fact the survey strategy is different for Reubin than other past surveys we've done that have just sort of like drill down on tiny patches of sky and like slowly built up the picture rather than Reubin which will like get the entire picture over 3 days and then do it again and again to slowly get like the you know the most faintest objects over time. Putting that aside, the reason you get such a massive difference in the images is first of all because of telescope size. So the mirror that actually collects the light from the stars and then focuses it down is so much bigger for Reuben than it is for Sloan. For Reuben it's 8. 4 m and for Sloan it was 2. 5 m. So you can just collect more light from the off. So the observations don't take you as long. But then also Reubin's field of view is huge. So it can cover this entire area of sky much quicker than Sloan ever did. So you can get this deeper image quicker. Now, this is just 1% of the total Reuben Field of View, a tiny sliver of the entire image that was released. The full one here is over 1,185 individual images that have then been stitched together to give you a field of view around about 2. 4 times the telescope's field of view. Plus, if you remember my video from a while back on how we get color in images of space, you take images through different filters that only let in certain colors or wavelengths of light. Like you take an image where you're only letting it in red colors of light and then what you actually get out in terms of raw data is a black and white image where you've just got light detected and light not detected. If you then do that in red filters, blue filters and green filters and color those black and white images accordingly. Red, green, and blue, you can then make a color image that would look like what we would see with our eyes if our eyes were as sensitive as the Reuben telescope. That's what we've got here. That's what we're looking at. It's not the raw data. It's this processed image to look like what we would see with our eyes. And if you want to pan and zoom around this image yourself, you can do with the Sky Viewer app made by the Reuben Observatory team, which I'll link below. That's what a lot of us astrophys were doing last week while we were waiting for them to release like the raw scientific data products like a week later. We were just sort of panning around this image to see what we could find in it and what was going to surprise us. Like for example, there's this galaxy that looks like it has a jet coming out of it, but that jet weirdly stops. And perhaps maybe you could argue there's like a symmetrical jet on the other side, but we can't quite tell with just this colored image. We need the raw data to play around with the levels and the contrast and then analyze what we find. Now, if we go back to that direct Reuben versus Sloan comparison before, there's a couple of things I want to point out. First of all, this super diffuse galaxy that doesn't appear in Sloan, but does in Reuben because the collective starlight like is so faint, but it still manages to be picked up by Reuben. If we find lots of those in Reuben data, that is going to be really interesting and really change our understanding of like galaxy evolution and how many, you know, galaxies of that type form and how they contribute to like merges of galaxies over time as well. Plus, you can also see that diffused light around these two spiral galaxies here as well, showing how they are so much bigger than they actually look in the Sloan data. And that confirms something that we've known for a while is that our measurements of how big galaxies are probably always going to be an underestimate because we don't know how much of that diffuse light on the edges were actually missing in these big surveys that scan down to a certain depth, a certain faintness. It's just revealed so clearly for us here. Then there's also these four galaxies up here that if you look at the stone image, they look like they're completely independent of each other. But Reuben reveals how they're all interacting, picking up on the faint bridges of stars that connect them as gravity pulls stars from one to the other as they fly past each other. I just want to take a minute here to appreciate how many more background galaxies Reuben actually detected. It is just unreal. Like if you look at the Sloan image of this same patch of sky, you think, sure, space is pretty empty in the background, right? But with Reuben, it's just like everything is a pixel now, right? Like sure, you can see the background noise starting to appear if you zoom in far enough. It's like really obvious, right? They stand out as these obviously red, green or blue individual pixels, but there are still clearly detections of so many galaxies in the background which if we manage to spot something interesting in Reuben data, we could then follow up with the James Web Space Telescope which has been designed with a much smaller field of view and the ability to detect light from incredibly distant galaxies that's very faint in order for us to be able to turn these fuzzy blobs spotted by Reuben into crisp detail. But as we're panning around this image here, I'm sure many of you have also noticed the weird looking stars. So that brings me to part two of this video. What's ### [8:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVcG8TZ8Wg&t=492s) Why do the stars look weird? Rainbow spikes & red circles with the weird looking stars? Because if you look, they've got sort of like a rainbow of colorful spikes around them. And in some cases, a very clear, crisp red circle around them as well. And that is a little bit jarring to see. I think we're all quite used to like knowing what stars look like in images from telescopes now just because especially images from the Hubble Space Telescope have become so part of popular culture. It's what cemented in our heads of stars having these fourointed spikes which I think is what led people to freak out a little bit when if you remember the James Web Space Telescope first images were released because all of a sudden stars now had eight spikes around them and now with Reuben we've got multiolor rainbow pointed stars. So what is going on? So first of all yes stars are round. They are spheres. They're not actually spiky. It's just what's going on in terms of the telescope optics that's making them appear to look that way. So, as we view stars with telescopes and pass the light through the optical system of mirrors that's designed to focus the light down, that changes the shape of what we see. The light spreads out. It hits sharp edges. It even interacts with itself and has its path changed. Now, this happens all the time, whether it's a telescope or a camera or even the camera on your phone. It's just that, you know, if the thing that you're taking a picture of is, you know, very spread out in terms of the light, then you kind of lose that. It diffuses out the impression of the camera. But if you're taking a picture of a very bright point of light, then essentially you can track, okay, what happens to the light as it passes through the optical system of the telescope or the camera. If you've ever tried to take a photo with your phone looking towards the sun, you'll have seen these bright spikes that appear as the light travels through the lenses in your phone camera. And the shape of the spikes of things that you get out is very specific to the shapes and the arrangement of the optical system you've got. So for the Hubble Space Telescope, that has a round mirror with four struts holding the mirror in place, which gives us four diffraction spikes. JWST has a hexagonal mirror giving us six spikes. But then it's also got three struts holding up the mirrors which gives us six more but some of those overlap. So they add together to give us eight spikes in total. Reuben is once again a round mirror but this time it has eight struts in pairs that are parallel to each other. So once again it gives us the four spike stars just with sort of extra thick spokes because of those parallel struts. But what about the multicolor nature of the spokes? Well, remember this is an image that has been made by taking separate images taken through a red filter, a green filter, and a blue filter, and then added together to give us the color image of what our eye would see. And these images were taken over seven different nights. So, of course, when we do this adding together, we line up the coordinates to make sure we're adding the same patch of sky together, so we're not blurring anything out. But if those images were taken at different times of the night, the sky will have rotated with respect to the telescope and the telescope's optical system and struts, meaning the struts were at a different angle to the objects that you were taking a picture of. And so you end up with these colorful spikes from these very bright stars getting rotated around. And because it's a different amount for each of the red, the green, and the blue filters, right? depending on when it was taken, you get them separating out into like red spikes, green spikes, and then blue spikes. Okay, fine. But then what about these weird red circles that also surround the even brighter of the stars in the image? And actually, if you look at the other image they released of the Tripfid and the Lagoon Nebula, you sometimes see it as a blue circle as well. Well, this I'm less sure about. Like, I'm not a member of the Reuben team. I'm not an optical engineer either, but a lot of me and my colleagues like spotted these weird red circles. We've had a couple of chats over coffee with our best guesses of what we think it is. So, take everything I'm about to say with a pinch of salt, but this is my best guess. I think this is a reflection of one of the telescope mirrors. So, the mirror setup for Reuben has three mirrors to focus the light with the third actually built into the first one, but with a different shape so that you actually concentrate that light down to the detectors. But, it means that this very first mirror that does that initial collecting of the light is a donut shape. And I think it's that doughnut shape that then gets reflected onto the image. Again, if you've ever tried to take a photo like looking in the direction of the sun or you've seen those shots in films in movies, right, where like sometimes the camera pans down, the sun's there and you get these sort of like artifacts and reflections of the sun's light through each of the lenses in the camera and the mirror components, right? That sometimes like separate out showing you each one. I think what we're seeing here is akin to that. I don't know why it's only in the red and sometimes in the blue for the nebula images that they took. Maybe they noticed it after taking the first few images and then corrected for it so it didn't appear in sort of later images that they took. Probably in like the blue or the green filters and so that's why it doesn't appear in those colors. I don't know. That's my best guess. And I'm happy to be corrected by any member of the Reuben team that might happen to be watching, you know, either down in the comments or if you want to reach out to me separately and then I can either like correct myself or confirm what I've just said in a future video. Now, the other fun thing about taking images through multiple filters over multiple nights like Reuben does is that anything that moves in the sky is so obvious. Either you can play it like a time lapse from image to image or you can make the color images like we were just looking at and they show up as these red, green, and blue streaks through the image. ### [13:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVcG8TZ8Wg&t=828s) Wow that’s a lot of asteroids Which brings me to part three, which I've lovingly dubbed, "Wow, that's a lot of asteroids. " Okay, so if you want to see this for yourself, go to the Reuben Sky Viewer app that I was talking about before that I'll link down below. And on the display settings, toggle on the asteroids. And then what you can do is pan around the image this time with these red, green, and blue lines showing exactly where an asteroid in the solar system has essentially photobombed this image and moved in the foreground of these galaxies in the background. And as you pan, it just feels like an absolutely endless number. If you count them up, there's just under 4,000 asteroids that have been detected in this one image. This one like collected mosaic image that's about 1. 4 times the field of view of Reubin. That was taken over just seven nights. Of those just under 4,000, 1,800 of them were already known asteroids in the solar system. But 2,14 of them were new asteroids that had never been spotted in the solar system. Most of them in the asteroid belt, but also seven near-Earth objects, 11 Jupiter Trojan asteroids that trail Jupiter in its orbit, and nine objects out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Over 2,000 new asteroids detected in such a short space of time is absolutely incredible. And it is worth stating here that none of them are a danger to Earth and they have already been reported to the minor planet center if you want to check them out. But if you consider just like the size of this patch of sky compared to you know the entire sky that's visible by Reubin from Chile in the next 10 years and you extrapolate from there. It's likely that Reubin will detect more asteroids in the next year alone than have been detected in the past 200 years. That's like over 1 and a half million asteroids. And these will just be the ones that we know to look out for because we've seen things like them before. So, we can train algorithms to pick them out. But what about the things we're not expecting, right? We still need human eyes to look at these images to flag anything weird. Which is why there's a lot of citizen science projects coming online now with Reuben datas that are asking for public volunteers to look at these images. There's the Reuben comet catchers project that launched on Monday the 30th of June that's asking volunteers to help look for asteroids that develop cometlike activity. So like tails, you know, in the Reuben images. And very soon we're also going to have a Galaxy Zoo project for you with Reuben data as well. Myself and the rest of the Galaxy Zoo team are working on getting little cutouts of every single galaxy we can find in those images uploaded onto the Galaxy Zoo website ready for you to classify their shapes so that we can use those classifications to analyze how their shapes differ compared to other surveys thanks to the brilliance of Reuben. And also prepare for the deluge of the billions of galaxies we know are coming our way in the next year 10 years that yeah okay we can get machine learning algorithms to classify but we need to train those machine learning algorithms on Reuben data first and for that we need humans we need people like yourself to look at these images for us. So this really is just the start of a very exciting 10 years to come. After one year, we'll have images like this of the entire sky that is visible from Chile. And after 10 years, those images will be even deeper, seeing even fainter things in both the foreground and the background as well. Plus, if there truly is another planet in our solar system, the long search for Planet 9 hiding out there beyond the orbit of Neptune, Reuben will be able to spot it within the next year. So stay tuned. Make sure you're subscribed because you are not going to want to miss this. Before we get to the bloopers, a big thank you to Brilliant for sponsoring this video. Brilliant is a learning app designed to be uniquely effective. It helps you get smarter every day with thousands of interactive lessons in maths, science, programming, data analysis, and AI. Each lesson is filled with hands-on problem solving that lets you play with concepts, a method that's been proven to be six times more effective than just simply passively watching lecture videos. Brilliant first principles approach helps you build understanding from the ground up. But it's this perfect mix of engaging problems, competitive features, and just daily encouragement that keeps you motivated and on track. I love Brilliant Science courses cuz they help you understand our universe at every level. Right. From the mechanics of simple machines all the way to the mindbending physics of black holes, I can't recommend Brilliant enough. You can really develop your scientific intuition through these visual interactive problem solving that gets you hands-on with key concepts. So to try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for 30 days. Head to brilliant. org/dbecky or scan the QR code on screen or you can click on that link in the description below and you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. So, big thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video. And now, roll those bloopers. And ### [19:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVcG8TZ8Wg&t=1145s) Bloopers once again, it is absolutely boiling in the UK. So, we sat here wishing that my hair was on top of my head like a pineapple. Some of the main differences with ran ran. That was Reuben and Sloan swung together. Oh, I wonder if people can tell that I've got a little bit of like, hey, fever bunged upness, you know? I feel like I should be like Phoebe singing like my sticky shoes, you know? It's just it's there pollen. --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/15155*