Astronomy’s newest telescope is a cosmic paparazzi, taking about 1,000 pictures of the southern sky every night from a mountaintop in Chile. With giant mirrors concentrating starlight into a 3,200-megapixel camera, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to reveal billions of cosmic objects in the next decade, and could solve some tantalizing mysteries—including whether another planet exists beyond Pluto. Sandrine Thomas, the deputy director of Rubin’s construction, calls it a “discovery machine;” in a preview this summer, Rubin snapped more than 2,000 never-before-seen asteroids. The observatory is expected to begin full operations by the end of the year.
