Watching the Skies

Space is full of mysteries, from black holes to dark matter × dark matter an invisible form of matter that astronomers believe makes up a large part of the universe (noun) . Now, astronomers have a new view of the universe. They can see the stars with the world’s largest digital camera.

The device is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera. It is part of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It sits atop a mountain in Chile. The camera is part of a 27-foot telescope.

On June 23, members of the Rubin team held a press conference. They released the camera’s first images. These images were all captured in just a few days. They showed stars, galaxies, and thousands of previously unseen asteroids.

Colossal Camera

The LSST camera took 10 years to build. Željko Ivezi directed its construction. During the June 23 press conference, he called the camera “the greatest astronomical discovery machine ever built.”

It’s certainly powerful. The new images reveal two nebulas × nebulas a cloud of gas and dust in space (noun) . They’re located thousands of light-years from Earth. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, nearly 6 trillion miles.)

Margaux Lopez is one of the camera’s mechanical engineers. She told TIME for Kids the camera is one of a kind. First of all, it’s huge. It’s about the size of a car. It’s also fast. The camera can take 1,000 images of the sky every 24 hours. That’s important, because space is vast.

“We can only see a little bit of what’s out there, and everything’s really spread out,” Lopez says. “In the first year, we are going to take more data than every telescope in the history of humanity combined has ever taken.”