On the night of June 30, a large survey telescope designed to map the ever-changing universe began full-scale operations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. This marks a major shift in how we gather knowledge about our planet’s immediate and distant surroundings. Over the course of three nights, the telescope captures images of the entire southern sky—and it will repeat this process for ten years. As a result, we will obtain an astronomical amount of data and records of what changes in the sky and how. This will allow us to explore the universe in ways that were previously inaccessible to us.
“Thanks to the large survey telescope, we will discover tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our solar system, millions of new variable stars in our galaxy, and we will observe billions of galaxies—their shapes, their distortions, and their gravitational lensing. We’ll use the observatory’s second very powerful tool for analysis. A huge number of these objects will be photographed, and we’ll be able to harness the power of statistics to analyze them,” says Michael Prouza, explaining the significance of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The astrophysicist and director of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences is the Czech Republic’s official representative on the observatory’s board.
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Three Questions for the Director of the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Who Is the Czech Republic’s Official Representative on the Observatory’s Board
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