DAVID HAMBLINGlooks forward to an exciting new era of astronomical discovery
The Vera C Rubin Observatory is a new astronomical facility being built on Cerro Pachón ridge in Chile to search for what researchers call “weird and wonderful” objects in our Solar System and beyond. The observatory, known as VRO, starts work in 2025, and AI will sift through the vast amounts of data it gathers, promising a rich and strange harvest of anomalies.
Space, as Douglas Adams observed, is “vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big”. There is a lot of night sky to observe, and only a limited number of observatories. This is why astronomy has always been such a fruitful field for amateurs: if you point even a small telescope at a patch of the heavens that nobody else is looking at, you might find something that nobody else has seen.
In earlier centuries, all new discoveries were made by more or less random stargazing. In 1572 Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe observed a new star in the constellation Cassiopeia, where there should not have been one. Others has reported new stars or novæ (from the Latin for ‘new’) before, but Brahe’s systematic record of his observations “Concerning the Star, new and never before seen in the life or memory of anyone” challenged the accepted view of fixed and unchanging heavens. This led to a new interpretation of the cosmos.
In 1781 the British astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet by accident. He was cataloguing faint, eighth-magnitude stars and noticed one that was moving relative to the others, a sure sign of an object inside the Solar System. Herschel initially assumed this was a comet, but later realised it was a seventh planet, the first to be discovered for millennia. To the delight of generations of schoolboys, the new discovery was given the name Uranus.
There are still too few observatories to see everything, and many discoveries are made by amateurs trawling the night sky. One such is Australian Terry Lovejoy, IT specialist by day, astronomer by night, with several new comets to his name, including Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) which later briefly became bright enough to be visible to the naked eye.
The VRO will end the reliance on lucky accidents by scanning the entire heavens in a “Legacy Survey of Space and Time”. This wil
