Vera Rubin Observatory, part two: astronomy enters its digital age

The Vera Rubin Observatory is about to start a decade-long survey of the night sky. In the process, it will generate hundreds of petabytes of astronomical data. Hidden within that firehose of information will be clues about some of the universe’s deepest mysteries—from dark matter and dark energy to the evolution of galaxies. To help scientists unlock those new celestial tales, the Rubin Observatory's team had to invent a bespoke way to organise, analyse and share the data. That technology, which will usher in a new, automated era for astronomy, may be one of the observatory’s most important and enduring legacies. 

In the second of two episodes, we visit the Rubin Observatory, 2,700m high in the Chilean Andes, to uncover how the telescope’s data travel from the summit to astronomers’ desks around the world. Listen to the first episode here. 

Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: William O’Mullane, Yusra AlSayyad and Leanne Guy. Thanks to everyone we spoke to at the Vera Rubin Observatory, including Alysha Shugart, Guillem Megias, Marina Pavlovic and Kevin Fanning.

You can see and explore the first images taken by the Vera Rubin Observatory on the SkyViewer platform.

For more on the scientific questions that the Vera Rubin Observatory is seeking to answer, listen to our “cosmology in crisis” series. 

Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.

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