Engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have unveiled the world’s largest digital camera. “Although the camera isn’t fully complete yet, all of its mechanical components are now together for the first time—in one photogenic structure,” the engineers said. The 3,200-megapixel camera is being made to be put up in an observatory in the Chilean Andes.
The world’s largest digital camera is in Menlo Park and is en route to a peak in northern Chile to study the stars in the hopes of finding billions of galaxies and other new things.
The camera has been in development for almost 20 years
The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is the largest digital camera ever created. The camera, which has been in development for almost 20 years, will be mounted inside a telescope on a mountaintop in northern Chile to map the night sky. While most telescopes have interchangeable parts, the camera and telescope are inseparable for the LSST.
“No other instrument is going to work, it’s not interchangeable,” SLAC Lead Engineer Travis Lange said. “A telescope and a camera, neither one of them really does much without the other. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.”
The average camera is somewhere between 16 and 25 megapixels, with some going as high as 100. The LSST reaches 3600 megapixels, with 200 4k sensors. Lange compares it to having a single image from this camera made up of 400 widescreen TVs.
The project’s objective is to map the sky, and this camera is especially well-suited for that task
The camera’s ability to peer into deep space allows it to gaze at the edges of neighboring galaxies and locate fainter stars. According to Stanford Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology Risa Wechsler, the research is expected to find 6 million new objects in the solar system as a result. Asteroids should make up the majority of the new items.
Wechsler stated that the LSST camera is expected to map 17 billion stars within the galaxy as well as tiny galaxies with only 500 stars beyond the galaxy. These tiny galaxies contain dark matter that alters the motion of the stars and can provide more information about the behavior of dark matter in space. With LSST, they hope to survey the entire universe to a distance of 12 billion light-years and find 20 billion galaxies.
SLAC researchers intend to assess the shapes of these galaxies and find gravitational lensing
Through the distortion of these galaxies, SLAC researchers intend to assess the shapes of these galaxies and find gravitational lensing. “It’s interesting because it actually allows us to make a map of all of the dark matter in the universe,” Wechsler said.
“By looking at how (the sky) evolves over time, we can make a map of the dark matter nearby,” Wechsler said. “We can make a map of the dark matter 5 billion light years away, 8 billion light years away, 10 million light years away. And that allows us to probe (into): how is structure forming over that entire time. How fast is gravity doing its job?”
The project’s second objective is to examine “dark energy” via the prism of dark matter. According to Wechsler, scientists don’t know exactly what dark energy is, but they believe that it’s not matter and may be a property of spacetime itself. What they do know is that dark energy is causing the universe to expand and accelerate, and they hope to understand why.
“We’re trying to map this thing out at much higher precision than we’ve been able to do so far,” Wechsler said. “And that’s what this dark matter map will basically enable us to do.”