This Revolutionary New Telescope Will Observe the Whole Sky Every Three Days

Astrophysics is, as many astrophysicists will tell you, the story of everything. The nature and evolution of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, dark matter and dark energy—and our attempts to understand these things—allow us to pose the ultimate questions and reach for the ultimate answers. But the practitioners of these arts, as the late astronomer Vera Rubin wrote in her autobiography’s preface, “too seldom stress the enormity of our ignorance.”

“No one promised that we would live in the era that would unravel the mysteries of the cosmos,” Rubin wrote. And yet a new observatory named for her, opening its eyes soon, will get us closer than ever before to unraveling some of them. This will be possible because the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will do something revolutionary, rare and relatively old-fashioned: it will just look out at the universe and see what there is to see.