TUCSON, Ariz. — The first images of the universe from the world's largest digital camera are now available for us to see and it all comes from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Dr. Sidney Wolff, a scientist in Tucson, was the woman behind the project.
She was the first director of the Rubin project, what used to be called the LSST, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. It was later renamed after a trailblazing astronomer, Vera Rubin.
Dr. Wolff was responsible for finding partners to help build the observatory, putting the core team together, selecting the site, establishing the design, writing construction proposals, and getting funding.
Dr. Wolff says it all started in 1998.
“Roger Angel at the University of Arizona had an idea of about how to build a telescope that could look at a very large area in the sky at one time. Most big telescopes look at a tiny little area," Dr. Wolff said.
Wolff said they wanted a telescope that would capture how galaxies evolve and how they’re affected by their environment.
"We know the universe is about 13.8 million years old, and we know that galaxies started forming only three or 400 million years after the expansion of the universe began. And so we want to know how the galaxies grow and change," Dr. Wolff said.
Her team chose to put the observatory in Chile because the U.S. National Observatory already operates there.
It is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.
More than a decade of planning and research, finally led up to construction starting in 2014.
They worked with U of A by getting the telescope mirrors through the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab.
"They did all the measurements on the mirror, especially this complicated one where you have some curvature and then in the center it's a much deeper curve," Dr. Wolff said. "They had to get it all exactly right because you can't fix it after the fact."
Another 10 years later, in 2025, the Rubin was put into action and delivered.
“Now, they finally got first light in April and we saw the very first images and we know that the telescope operates just as well as we dreamed it should and so it’s fantastic," Dr. Wolff said.
It was a full circle moment for Wolff seeing the images come to life.
“I was in a room down at the U of A campus with a couple hundred people and when they saw the image they all clapped. It’s thrilling," Dr. Wolff said.
The Rubin telescope will take hundreds of images of the Southern Hemisphere sky every night for ten years to catch some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.
“If there’s a killer asteroid that’s out there that will impact the earth, we’ll find it. We don't think there are any, but in the first six nights of observation, this telescope found 2,000 asteroids that had never been seen before," Dr. Wolff said. "Say a star explodes like a supernova, we’ll see it.”
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is considered a game-changer and opens the door to even more experiments.
“School kids can get the excitement of doing original research and discovering something nobody ever knew before," Dr. Wolff said.
Dr. Wolff handed the project over to the next person in 2014 and then retired.
She is honored in Chile at a viewpoint with a plaque that says Vista Sidney Wolff, for her leadership in enabling the construction of not only the Rubin Observatory, but also the SOAR and Gemini telescopes on Cerro Pachon, high in the Andes mountains.
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