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The massive facility in Chile officially launched its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Utilizing the largest digital camera in the world (3,200 megapixels), the telescope is capturing high-definition images of the entire southern sky every few nights to create a time-lapse of the universe.
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It's primary objective is the 10 year LSST mission. Using the largest digital camera ever made the telescope will automatically take panoramic pictures of the entire southern sky every few nights. By taking hundreds of thousands of photos over a decade, it's main goal is to see how the sky changes night by night, which will help us answer 4 big questions.
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It will help understand dark matter and energy by mapping far away galaxies, to see how dark matter keeps the galaxies together like a scaffolding (it just does, okay?). It will also take an inventory of the solar system, the telescope will act like a giant radar, sending alerts when new objects have moved during its photos. It is projected to discover thousands of new objects, including the elusive planet nine.
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It will also map the milky way by cataloguing over 10 billion stars by measuring their locations and chemical signatures, helping scientists understand the formation of the milky way. Finally it will be great at spotting transient events, things that happen quickly and dissapear as they happen, spotting stuff like supernovas, neutron star mergers, black holes tearing up stars and other space anomalies.
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Oh my science!