Numlock Sunday: Rebecca Boyle on the telescope that will change everything

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to space journalist Rebecca Boyle, who wrote This Revolutionary New Telescope Will Observe the Whole Sky Every Three Days for Scientific American. Here's what I wrote about it:

Just a few weeks of testing remain for the hotly anticipated Vera C. Rubin Observatory, situated on a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes. It’s got the largest camera in the history of astronomy — a 10-meter-by-10-meter steel cube — with a 1.5-meter lens, a unique three-mirror structure and a collecting area of 6.67 meters. The camera weighs 350 metric tons, and will canvas the entire visible sky from the Southern Hemisphere every three nights, producing an eye-watering 20 terabytes of data every single night that the computer scientists are still figuring out how to sift through. That is 350 times the data produced by the James Webb Space Telescope every day. In its first year alone, the camera will collect more data than has been collected from every telescope in the history of astronomy combined, and it will do this for at least 10 years.

I am in awe of this telescope, and just last Monday, we got the first magnificent images from this thing. On that occasion, I talked to Rebecca all about what makes this thing so cool.

Longtime readers might remember Boyle from last year when we talked about her book, Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are, which is absolutely worth a read if you have not yet checked it out.

This interview has been condensed and edited. All images from Vera Rubin, you really must check this thing out, I am limited by what your inbox will accept by some of these images are available at dozens of gigabytes in size.

Rebecca, thank you so much for coming back on. It is great to have you back.

Thanks for having me.

You wrote a really, really fascinating story in Scientific American about a new instrument that just went online, which is fascinating for so many different reasons. If people remember, when you were on last time last time, you talked about your book: all about the moon and our human relationship with it. You cover a lot of stuff in astronomy. But Vera Rubin seems to be something really special. Do you want to talk a little bit about what this observatory is and what makes it unique?

Yeah, this thing is going to be amazing. It is the most powerful telescope ever built and the most powerful camera ever made. It’s the largest camera ever built by humans, and it’s going to collect more information about the sky than all other optical telescopes combined in the history of humankind. Within the first few months, it’s going to do that. So it’s going to be a totally new window on the universe.

It’s kind of like a do-everything telescope, which is one thing that makes it really cool. At this point in astronomy — we have things in space, the James Webb Space Telescope is out past the orbit of the moon, way in deep space. We have all these amazing things on mountains, and they all can do really specialized, really detailed, amazing stuff. But what makes this one really special is that it can do a lot of that stuff better than anything ever before.

And it’s just going to look like it’s a survey telescope. So it really doesn’t even have a target, necessarily, in the way that James Webb does. It points to a certain part of the sky where astronomers thought they were going to see interesting stuff, and they are seeing interesting stuff. For the most part, things like the Keck telescopes and the Very Large Telescope (some of the other large optical telescopes on Earth) also have pretty targeted things they do. You have to apply for time as an astronomer and like tell it what to look at. You have to compete for time, and you'd better have a good idea of what you want to see. And this one is just going to look; it’s just going to like, check out what’s going on and see stuff that no one’s ever seen before. All the time, every night, for the next 10 years.

The data part of this, you wrote in your story, is the most jaw-dropping thing. It’s 20 terabytes of data every night. It’s 350 times the data produced by the James Webb Space Telescope every day. You mentioned a little bit earlier: in its first year, there will be more data collected from this telescope than from every telescope in the history of telescopes.

Yeah, it’s insane. I mean, it’s wild to think about how much information, how much light it’s just going to sit there and collect every night, and what we can do with that. So it’s going to see things like quasars and colliding black holes.

It’s also going to see almost every near-Earth asteroid that we haven’t seen before. It’s going to find pretty much 90% of the ones that might hit us. We know about the big ones, for the most part. There are a few that surprise us here and there. But mostly we have an idea of where the big, disastrous asteroids lurk. But there’s a lot that could hit a city and do some damage, or hit an area and land on some population centers. And we don’t know where all those are because there are just so many of them.

But this one is going to find them. And it’s also going to find new comets that we didn’t know about. If there are other planets or planetary objects, like dwarf planets, out way past Pluto, the telescope might find those. It’s going to do an incredible amount of stuff.

It’s going to study galaxies that are shaped by the presence of dark matter. And that’s why it’s named for Vera Rubin, the astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter in the ’70s. She is one of these people who never really got enough credit for being an amazing scientist, in part because she was a woman at a time when there weren’t very many women astronomers. She is the person who was able to convincingly show that dark matter, “dark” meaning we just can’t see it. There’s stuff all over the universe shaping the direction in which galaxies go around each other and through space. And she showed that by looking at the way these galaxies rotate. And it was pretty convincing evidence that if you think about the way mass works, galaxies should spin faster on the inside. If they orbit a center of gravity in the middle of (usually) a black hole, they should spin faster there than they do on the very outer edge. And they don’t. The outer edges of galaxies spin almost as fast as the middle of a galaxy, which doesn’t make a lot of sense unless there’s a whole bunch of other stuff around them. And that’s what dark matter is. And so she showed that through optical astronomy. They named this thing for her a few years ago.

So it’s going to do that, too. It’s going to look at the entire spectrum of things you can see from tiny little rocks going around the solar system to dark matter itself, shaping the evolution of galaxy super clusters.

Yeah, I think that the fun part about this was that it's so powerful. It’s going to find out so many interesting things just by tracking the sky. It’s also going to discover spy satellites. They have to actually run it through Langley to scrub some of that, if I’m not mistaken. Is that right?

That’s right. Yeah, it’s going to find a lot of stuff that we put up there and be like, “Oh, hey, what’s this?” It’s actually an issue for a lot of reasons; it’s an issue for national security and stuff. They have to verify that we don’t want to post the locations of these satellites to our servers, to our whole community, allowing people to know where to look for spy satellites. But also, there are so many of those now. And there are so many of these small satellites transmitting internet that are going to get in the way of it. That’s been a huge issue in the last few years. They were really worried about this a couple of years ago.

I think it’s getting somewhat better, in part, because SpaceX is trying to work on it. They really have tried to work with the astronomy community and figure out ways to make the Starlink satellites look darker so they don’t reflect as much light. It’s just going to be a problem. There’s just a lot of those up there now. There are thousands of them and more almost every week. And now Amazon is going to launch its own whole fleet of these things called Project Kuiper. And it’s also going to broadcast internet. There’s just a bunch of stuff in the sky, so it’s going to go across the field of view of this observatory all the time. And they have to figure out how to scrub those out.

That will get easier to do after the first year. What they’re going to do starting out, here now in the summer and fall, is create a base layer catalog of the entire sky. Then you can look at that as a reference point. And largely that’s for what changes. Here’s what it looked like in June of 2025, and then now in October, “Oh, look, something is different that wasn’t there before. Is that a comet or is it a planet or is it an interstellar object,” you know? So it’s really for science.

They can combine images of this all-sky map to see what changes. That’s really going to help them with the satellite problem because then they can say, “Well, this Starlink train is in our way, but we can just erase those pixels, essentially.” And then we have enough other background images from the same set of images, the same set of sky, that you can superimpose better data over those bad pixels.

There are ways around it. It also seems like part of the challenge is solving these problems in real time. They’re going to collect those 20 terabytes a night, but they’re not going anywhere. They can work on this in post, right?

Oh, yeah. There is so much processing for all of this. That’s one of the coolest things about it is how they’re going to handle that fire hose. Because there’s so much. I mean, it’s hard to even understand how much data that really is. James Webb is hugely powerful, and it can look into the farthest reaches of the universe that we’ve ever been able to see. It could almost see to the very beginning of stars. So it has this incredible power, and there’s a lot of data that this thing downlinks every day. But it’s still a speck compared to what Vera Rubin is going to get every single night.

It’s blowing my mind how much they have to deal with. There are entire PhDs that have been written about how to deal with that. How do we go through this meaningfully? It’s such a fire hose. There’s so much coming out of this that it’s almost hard to deal with. To create algorithms that can go through all that stuff, there’s going to be a lot of machine learning and a lot of AI systems prowling through some of this stuff to help astronomers. They also want to send out alerts anytime something cool shows up. The problem is they’re going to send out like 10 million alerts a night. It’s going to be so much. So good luck. I’m glad I’m not an astronomer, having to deal with that, because it’s going to be a little overwhelming. Just the number of pixels of cool stuff that we can see all the time now.

God, the email alone. Yeah, earlier this year, I talked to this artist, Morry Kolman, who has this project called First Light, where he sorts through algorithmically discovered stars that have never been seen by human eyes. And you can obtain one on your own. But it just seems like we’re going to unlock the sky. It sounds like it’s a miraculous thing.

It is. It is like a miraculous thing. I’m so glad this was funded a long time ago. I’m so glad it’s been worked on for the last two decades by extraordinarily talented scientists and engineers who built this camera that’s the size of a car, who trucked it to the top of a mountain in Chile in the middle of the Andes. It’s a ridiculous thing that this actually happened and that it worked. And that now it’s on and doing its job. It’s just hard to believe that we could pull this off. So I’m thankful that it happened. And now we can sit there and sit back and just watch all this come in. It’s going to see everything that there is to see. I think people are genuinely not ready for any of that. I mean, in terms of astronomers, professionals who are going to use this stuff and create entire careers based on these findings. And the public, people love new images from space from a new telescope. People get super excited about James Webb information. Anytime there’s a really new old galaxy, it’s still pretty big news. But it’s really the images that people care about. This thing sends back just absurd levels of detail from every piece of sky every single day, and you can zoom in, and it’s not like it’s ever going to get pixelated. The detail alone is so incredible. People are going to have a field day.

I want to talk a little bit about those images because we are talking on Monday, June 23. It was announced that the Vera Rubin would put out its first images on, would you look at that, Monday, June 23. So what has come out today? What has caught your eye? What do you think is a cool thing that has dropped from this first initial splash of imagery?

I mean, the idea that you can zoom in almost forever. They sent pictures to some of the journalists who wrote about it ahead of time, just so we could prepare articles and figure out what people are going to be seeing, so we can explain it to them. And I was like, “Oh, cool.” I pulled up my phone, and they were like, “Don’t do that. Go to a computer with a large screen if you can, because your phone is not going to do it justice. An entire wall of 4K HDTVs is not going to do it justice.”

What I was blown away by was the detail. It almost looks like you’re in space, if you could blow up these images. One of my favorite ones of the four they put out today is the Virgo cluster, which is this smattering of spiral galaxies. And there are two big ones that are merging in the lower right of the image. If you zoom in on it, it’s like you’re going into them. You feel like you’re in the Millennium Falcon or something, and you’re going through space because the detail is so fine and yet so wide.

The field of view is so wide. It can see so much, but it can see so deep into that field. It’s hard to put into words how different that is from most observatories. You normally get one or the other most of the time. You can get a really, really deep view like JWT gives us or Hubble, but it’s a really small, small section of the sky. Or you get a whole big wide field survey, but it’s pretty close by. You don’t see a lot of detail in deep space.

Being able to do both of those things, you can just click and zoom, and you keep zooming, and it never gets blurry. And you’re like, “I’m going through space.” It was way, way cooler than I even thought it was going to be.

It’s such a flex. I’m pulling up this one: the first look of the Trifid and Lagoon, which I will embed in this post. It says on the website that if you want to download the full resolution, it’s 24 gigabytes.

And this is one frame from one night, from one 10-second exposure. They’re doing that literally every 30 seconds, every single day for the next decade. It’s hard to wrap your mind around, I think.

I mean, it’s so exciting. Well, I guess just to wrap it up again, it’s been a challenging moment for a lot of science stuff. This is a really hopeful moment of the shape of things to come, of what happens when you, when there’s this long-running support of science. What are you most looking forward to from Vera Rubin? And what are you most looking forward to in the field?

Yeah, it is a really great moment for astronomy and astrophysics and science in the United States in general, which is very beleaguered right now. People are feeling really attacked and maligned and just really discouraged by the state of political affairs. So this is a nice reminder of what can happen when we work together. I don’t want to sound like I’m being cheesy and trite, but it’s really true that working on something for the benefit of everybody does still show American prowess, American ingenuity, hard work and creativity. It’s not just because we want to show off or something. It’s really for the benefit of everybody who lives on this planet. And I think it’s exciting that people get excited about it. People love this stuff. I feel gratified that people still care about space and pretty space images.

And I’m excited to see what they’re going to find. I’m really excited to see the detail that this is going to unveil around how stars and galaxies come together, how clouds of gas form, like these pink fluorescent candy-looking fluff in the middle of nothing with golden amber around. This is where stars are being born. And we can understand more about how that works by looking at these things. And we can understand what dark matter may be by understanding how it shapes the evolution and history of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. So we’re going to find out things that we’ve been asking about for as long as I’ve been alive and much longer. We can finally get some answers.

Amazing. All right. So, where can folks find you? Where can they find your work?

I am on Blue Sky, @rboil31. And I work for Scientific American; I’m a contributing editor for them. I write for the print magazine, and I write for the website pretty frequently. I am also a writer contributor for Quanta Magazine and a bunch of other places like the New York Times, the Atlantic and several other outlets. And my book is just out in paperback; it’s called Our Moon.

Folks should definitely check that out. Well, thanks so much.

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Edited by Crystal Wang

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