A car-sized camera, a mountain buried in snow, thousands of asteroids—and a telescope set to film the southern sky for a decade. Meet the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and discover what it could reveal about dark matter, Planet Nine, asteroid defense, and the growing Starlink challenge. Join us for a cosmic deep dive!
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#Space #Astronomy #Universe #Science #Telescope
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@marschroniken
Musik: Epidemic Sound.
0:00 - The Telescope Named for Vera Rubin
2:19 - A Camera Built to Map the Sky
3:49 - A Time-Lapse Film of the Universe
5:41 - Rubin’s First Discoveries
7:12 - The Storm Delays Observations
8:19 - Asteroid Defense and Planet Nine
9:30 - The Starlink Problem
11:34 - Assessment and the Future of Astronomy
Subscribe for more space stories!
Tell us in the comments what you liked most about the video.
#Space #Astronomy #Universe #Science #Telescope
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@marschroniken
Musik: Epidemic Sound.
0:00 - The Telescope Named for Vera Rubin
2:19 - A Camera Built to Map the Sky
3:49 - A Time-Lapse Film of the Universe
5:41 - Rubin’s First Discoveries
7:12 - The Storm Delays Observations
8:19 - Asteroid Defense and Planet Nine
9:30 - The Starlink Problem
11:34 - Assessment and the Future of Astronomy
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00On June 30th, 2026, filming begins on a mountain in Chile for the biggest movie ever made.
00:09The largest digital camera in the world is supposed to film the entire southern sky
00:14for 10 years. Every few nights a complete sweep. Even during its test run it found 2,104 unknown
00:24asteroids in just 10 hours. All other telescopes in the world combined manage about 20,000 in a year.
00:32Just over two weeks after filming began, it's over. In mid-July, a historic winter storm hits the
00:39region. The summit is evacuated. Up to 3 meters of snow cover the mountain. Three months later,
00:45the most important new telescope of this decade still hasn't resumed observing. What kind of
00:52machine is this? Why does it find things that James Webb would never find? And why does its
00:58most persistent opponent come from the company we talk about here the most?
01:04My name is Sirwan and this is Mars Chroniken.
01:13Vera Rubin and the Invisible Vera Rubin, born in 1928,
01:18wants to study Astronomy in Princeton in 1948. The answer is brief. Women are not admitted to the
01:26program. And that remains the case until 1975. In the 1970s, together with her colleague Kent Ford,
01:35she measures how fast stars orbit the center of the Andromeda Galaxy and dozens of other spiral
01:42galaxies. The outer stars should move more slowly than the inner ones. But what is measured is
01:48something different. They are just as fast. That only works if there is much more mass in these galaxies
01:55than what is visible. Rubin's rotation curves became the strongest evidence for dark matter.
02:02The Nobel Prize. She never received it until her death in 2016. Three years later,
02:09the US Congress named a telescope after her by law. The first national observatory in the US named after
02:17this inspiring person. A camera as big as a car. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is located on Cerro
02:25Pachon in the Chilean Andes at an altitude of about 2650 meters. It was funded by the US National Science
02:33Foundation and the Department of Energy. Together, that's about 810 million dollars. James Webb costs
02:42around 10 billion. The main mirror measures 8.4 meters. The trick lies in the design with three
02:50mirrors. Two of which are ground from a single block of glass. This keeps the device compact and
02:56allows it to cover a field of 3.5 degrees in diameter. That's an area of more than 40 full
03:04moons in a
03:05single image. At the focal point sits the largest digital camera ever built. 3200 megapixels. Weighing
03:163 tons. As big as a compact car. And its front lens with a diameter of 1.57 meters holds
03:24a world record.
03:25For a single image at full resolution, you would need a wall of 400 Ultra HD televisions. This device
03:33with over 200 tons of moving mass exposes for 30 seconds, then swivels to the next position in 5
03:42seconds and exposes again. Around 1000 images per night. A film instead of a photo. James Webb is a
03:50sculptor. Its first deep field, according to NASA, shows a piece of the sky as big as a grain of
03:58sand
03:58at arm's length. Webb looks incredibly deep. But you have to tell it where to look. Ruben looks everywhere.
04:08Over and over again and reports what has changed. Every three to four nights, the entire southern sky is
04:15covered once. Over 10 years, each spot will be captured about 800 times. When put together,
04:23it creates a time-lapse film of the universe. When stacked, it becomes the deepest wide field map
04:29ever made with an expected 20 billion galaxies. The software compares each new image as soon as it's
04:37available with the old one. Anything that is brighter, darker or has shifted triggers an alarm.
04:45And within two minutes, the alert goes out to astronomers all over the world. On February 24,
04:512026, this stream of alerts went public. With 800,000 alerts on the first night. In full operation,
05:00it could be up to 7 million. Every night. In the search for dark matter and dark energy,
05:08Ruben will get help from NASA's Roman Space Telescope starting in 2027, which was launched on
05:15August 30, 2026. Our video about it is linked in the description below. A quick note about the
05:22channel. If you like this kind of video, please give it a thumbs up and hype it. That's two clicks
05:28below the video and it helps the channel a lot with the algorithm. If you want more, become a channel
05:34member and see every video before everyone else. Thanks to everyone who is already a member.
05:40What Ruben has already found? On June 23, 2025, the observatory showed its first images. The Triffid
05:48and the Lagoon Nebula and a swarm of millions of galaxies in the Virgo cluster. The real sensation
05:56is in the fine print. The 2,104 asteroids from 10 hours, including seven near-Earth ones. None of them
06:05are
06:06dangerous. A few days later, another telescope discovers the interstellar comet 3I Atlas. When the Ruben
06:14team reviews their test images, they find it there as early as June 21, 10 days before the official
06:21discovery. No one had been looking for it. In January 2026, the first scientific publication with data from the large
06:30camera is released. The asteroid 2025 MN45 is 710 meters in size and rotates once every 1.88 minutes. A
06:43loose
06:44pile of rubble would fly apart in the process. This chunk must be as solid as a massive rock. A
06:51record for
06:52its size class. In April 2026, just a month and a half of test operations yielded more than 11,000
06:59newly discovered asteroids. Among them are 33 near-Earth objects and around 380 objects beyond Neptune.
07:08And all of this before the actual movie has even started. Two weeks of filming and then… snow. In mid
07:16-July,
07:16a historic winter storm hits the Kokimbo region. With flooding in the valley and up to three meters
07:23of snow on the mountain, the summit is evacuated. Access is cut off. Snow and rain enter parts of the
07:30facility. For weeks, the teams struggle just to make their way back up. At the beginning of September,
07:37a generator takes over the power supply. In mid-September, the camera's computers start running again.
07:43At the beginning of October, the main mirror is cleaned directly in the telescope. The camera
07:48is once again connected to power and cooling. As of October 9th, the telescope still isn't looking
07:55at the sky. The team isn't giving a fixed date, but they're expecting it to be a matter of days
08:00rather than weeks. There is no known damage to the mirrors or the camera. Over a 10-year operating period,
08:07losing a few months is manageable. It's still frustrating because the comparison images,
08:13that everything will be measured against later, are taken in the first few months.
08:19Asteroid Defense and Planet Nine
08:22Of the near-Earth asteroids over 140 meters, the city destroyers, we only know about 40% today.
08:31Rubin is supposed to raise this share to around 70% and find nearly 90,000 new near-Earth objects.
08:39The rest is supposed to be handled by the NASA telescope NEOSurveyor in the infrared,
08:44starting from September 2027 at the earliest. If you want to deflect an asteroid, you have to know
08:50about it years in advance. And then there's Planet Nine. Since 2016, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown from
08:58Kel-Tec have suspected the existence of an undiscovered planet far beyond Neptune. Because
09:04the orbits of some distant icy bodies are aligned in a strikingly similar way. Rubin is expected to
09:10increase the number of known objects out there almost tenfold. Batygin calls this the direct test.
09:17Either the pattern holds, or it was just a coincidence due to the small sample size.
09:24My prediction, marked as an opinion, is that we will know in a few years. The Starling problem.
09:30A telescope with a huge field of view and extreme sensitivity is especially vulnerable to satellites
09:37that leave bright streaks across its images. The Rubin team simulated early on what 42,000
09:44Starling satellites would mean. Up to 30% of all images would have at least one trail and almost every
09:52image during twilight. SpaceX was the first operator to respond, with darker surfaces and sunshades
10:01developed in collaboration with the Rubin team. The telescope plans its sweeps around unknown orbits
10:08and masks trails using software. But the problem is growing faster than the solutions. In July 2016,
10:15the European Southern Observatory, or ESO for short, calculated this in a study.
10:20Today, there are about 14,000 to 15,000 active satellites in orbit. Applications have been filed
10:26worldwide for 1.7 million satellites. SpaceX alone registered up to 1 million satellites for data
10:33centers in orbit in January 2026. According to the study, about 100,000 would be manageable.
10:40And even that only if they remain dim. In the worst case, with a camera like Rubin's,
10:47most images would be unusable for several hours per night. In addition, the company Reflect Orbital
10:54wants to use up to 50,000 mirror satellites at night to direct sunlight onto the Earth. Our video
11:00about this is linked below. The first test satellite was approved by the US Telecommunications
11:05Authority, EFSA, in July 2026, despite the protest of the astronomers. And one more footnote. According to research
11:14by the magazine The Atlantic, Rubin's images first go through a filter from the US government, which
11:20removes secret satellites. The alerts come immediately. The full image is only after about 80 hours.
11:28The best eye on the sky in the world also sees things that no one is supposed to see.
11:35Conclusion and assessment. My honest assessment, clearly marked as an opinion.
11:40First, I consider Rubin to be the most important new ground-based telescope of this decade.
11:46Webb and the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope provide the close-ups. Rubin provides the addresses,
11:53where it's worth taking a closer look. For less than a tenth of the price of Webb. The storm is
11:59a setback,
12:00but nothing more as long as the mirror and camera remain intact. Secondly, the greater danger lies in
12:07funding and in orbit. The White House wants to cut the NSF's budget for 2027 again by more than half.
12:17Congress is still opposing it so far. Since October 1st, the NSF has only been operating on a temporary
12:23budget until December 11th. So, nothing has been decided yet. An instrument costing 810 million dollars,
12:32lacking the funds for analysis, would be the most expensive hard drive in the world. Thirdly,
12:38the point that hurts me as someone who has been following SpaceX for years. I want internet from
12:43orbit. I want Starship. And I want a dark sky for such machines. With some 10,000 darkened satellites,
12:51the two can co-exist. With a million as things stand today, it doesn't work. Fourth, and for this,
12:59the astronomers among you will probably hate me. I think that the future of professional astronomy
13:04does not lie in ground-based telescopes, but in telescopes on the Moon and in space.
13:12Because not only satellites in Earth orbit are a problem for telescopes. Light pollution. The
13:18atmosphere itself and other terrestrial signals also interfere. With launch systems like Starship,
13:24we will be able to build constellations of telescopes that will allow us to gain insights into the
13:31universe that are not possible with terrestrial telescopes. Vera Rubin showed that the largest
13:38part of the universe is invisible. The telescope named after her is supposed to find out
13:43what it is made of. It just needs to wake up again first. My name is Sirvan and this was
13:49Mars Chroniken.
13:50Thank you for tuning in. Per aspera ad astra.