The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus
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Summary
Astrophysicist Tony Tyson has helped develop increasingly large cameras for mapping the universe throughout his career.
His work using a novel imaging chip called a charge-coupled device (CCD) in the 1980s allowed for the first high-resolution map of dark matter.
In the 90s, Tyson’s Big Throughput Camera was used to study the expansion of the universe and discovered dark energy.
To better study these mysterious entities, Tyson founded the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the 2000s, which has recently shared images of 10 million galaxies.
The Rubin Observatory’s LSST camera is the largest digital camera ever built, with 3.2 billion pixels, and will photograph 20 billion galaxies over the next decade.
Over that time, it could potentially help illuminate dark matter and energy’s roles in accelerating the universe’s expansion.
“It’ll take a number of years because we have to have ultra-deep images of a wide swath of the universe,” Tyson said. “But I think already by year five, we’ll know quite a lot.
