High atop Cerro Pachón in the dusty Chilean Andes, a massive silver dome has spent the past several months pulling back the curtain on the cosmos. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which recently completed its first full season of routine science operations, is delivering a stream of sky-survey data so immense that it is fundamentally changing how humanity studies the night sky.
Unlike space telescopes such as Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope—which zoom in with surgical precision on single targets or tiny slivers of deep space—Rubin was built for breadth. Outfitted with a custom 3.2-gigapixel camera, roughly the size of a small hatchback car and the largest digital camera ever constructed for astrophysics, the observatory
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