The first images of the greatest cosmic movie ever made were released by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory this past summer, and one of the \u201cdirectors\u201d was UW\u2013Madison physics professor Keith Bechtol.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a story a decade in the making for Bechtol, who served in a leadership role as the observatory\u2019s System Verification and Validation Scientist and has been part of the international collaboration since 2016. He and his UW\u2013Madison research group have been key players on a team of thousands of people that brought the observatory to the main stage. In 2025, its state-of-the-art telescope started taking the first images of the night sky.<\/p>\n
\u201cRubin Observatory is a confluence of technology that allows us to map the universe faster than we\u2019ve ever been able to before,\u201d Bechtol says. \u201cIt will catalog more stars, galaxies, and Solar System objects during the first year of science operations than all previous telescopes combined. We will chronicle how the universe changes over time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Space-based telescopes like Hubble and James Webb typically focus on one spot for a prolonged time. In contrast, the ground-based Rubin Observatory, positioned on a mountaintop in Chile, is quickly scanning the sky, taking an image with its 3.2-billion-pixel camera every 40 seconds and collecting 20 terabytes of data each night. The observatory is running the \u201cLegacy Survey of Space and Time,\u201d capturing the entire southern hemisphere sky every three nights over its anticipated 10-year run.<\/p>\n
In his role, Bechtol was one of five technical group leaders who organized the observatory\u2019s commissioning effort \u2014 the building, implementation, and testing that happens on the way to a fully operating observatory. Bechtol oversaw the science deliverables of the project.<\/p>\n
\u201cI gather the evidence to show that all components of Rubin Observatory are working together to produce the most detailed time-lapse view of the cosmos ever made,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been responsible for anticipating things that could go wrong and helping to address those challenges, designing observation plans, rehearsing observatory operations, and implementing tests of increasing sophistication as we built the observatory. It\u2019s been many years of preparation to get to this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
In April, Rubin Observatory achieved \u201cfirst photon.\u201d In June, people across the globe celebrated the release of the first images, including a viewing party in Chamberlin Hall.<\/p>\n
Bechtol and his group will use the data to probe fundamental questions related to dark matter, dark energy, and the early universe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re using the whole universe as a laboratory to ask big, open questions about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time. What is the universe made of? How did the universe begin? How will it end?\u201d Bechtol says. \u201cWe use measurements of strong and weak gravitational lensing and the clustering of galaxies to study dark energy, as well as so-called ultrafaint galaxies to learn about dark matter.\u201d<\/p>\n
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