{"id":435759,"date":"2025-12-09T14:26:32","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T14:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/435759\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T14:26:32","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T14:26:32","slug":"the-visionary-physicist-who-gave-us-a-new-way-to-view-the-cosmos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/435759\/","title":{"rendered":"The visionary physicist who gave us a new way to view the cosmos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Earlier this year, Tony Tyson got a sneak preview of the first images taken by the brand-new Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile<\/a> \u2014 a project he first dreamt up more than 30 years ago. After he and his team had spent months troubleshooting the telescope\u2019s hardware and control software, thousands of galaxies came into perfect focus. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to know that everything is working, but it\u2019s another thing to see it with your own eyes,\u201d says Tyson. \u201cWhen I saw that, I said \u2018wow\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

From its perch on Cerro Pach\u00f3n in the Andes, the Rubin observatory will soon use the largest digital camera in the world<\/a> to begin making a continuous video of the southern sky. Despite weighing some 350 tonnes, the telescope has a compact design that allows it to move nimbly, capturing a different exposure every 40 seconds. It will map the Universe\u2019s invisible dark matter<\/a> in 3D, detect millions of pulsating or exploding stars<\/a> and spot asteroids that could threaten Earth<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Its unprecedented design and the US$810-million cost made the Rubin a huge bet. \u201cIt was high-risk, high-reward. We took the risk,\u201d says Tyson, a physicist at the University of California, Davis.<\/p>\n

Tyson not only conceived the project, but also pushed it forwards, despite early scepticism. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have the Rubin Observatory today if he hadn\u2019t had that vision, and also that dogged determination,\u201d says Catherine Heymans, an astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and the Astronomer Royal for Scotland.<\/p>\n

Tyson\u2019s interest in science, and building electronic devices, started early. When he was five, a bout of pulmonary disease and rheumatic fever forced him to spend many hours in a steam tent, where he listened to shortwave radio. This experience, he says, kick-started his lifelong interest in getting information out of noisy signals. He also had an early interest in the science of gravity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Soon after earning a PhD in physics, he joined AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1969. He worked on an early gravitational-wave detector<\/a>, and then took an interest in charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors \u2014 which had just been invented \u201cdown the hall\u201d. He realized that the devices\u2019 ability to sense even tiny amounts of light could transform astronomy. He set out to use these sensors to reveal even the faintest, most distant galaxies.<\/p>\n

Tyson\u2019s ultimate goal was to image large swathes of the sky, measuring how galaxies\u2019 shapes distorted as their light travelled across a Universe filled with immense lumps of dark matter<\/a>. He started applying for telescope time to search for the effect in 1973. \u201cI got turned down time after time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people didn\u2019t think it was possible\u201d, particularly from the ground, says Heymans. But in 2000, Tyson was one of the first researchers to use the technique, called \u2018weak gravitational lensing\u2019, to reveal the presence of dark matter (D. M. Wittman et al. Nature 405<\/b>, 143\u2013148; 2000<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Tyson continued to use CCDs to build larger and larger digital cameras for telescopes. One that he built in the early 1990s with physicist Gary Bernstein, his postdoc at the time, was installed at a US telescope in Chile and was a key tool in the 1998 discovery of dark energy<\/a>. While working on that telescope, Tyson got the idea for the Rubin telescope, which he led from the first proposal in 2000 until the main mirror was on its way to completion. He still holds the role of chief scientist, managing the tune-up of the complex apparatus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this year, Tony Tyson got a sneak preview of the first images taken by the brand-new Vera…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":435760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156038,131971,45482,10046,10047,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-435759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-astronomical-instrumentation","9":"tag-astronomy-and-astrophysics","10":"tag-cosmology","11":"tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","12":"tag-multidisciplinary","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115690077523096288","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}