The Vera Rubin telescope could play a more important role in astronomy than any instrument before it.
spectrum.
Ideally, the two telescopes will work together once Rubin starts taking its first photos, a few months after construction wraps. Because it scans across a 3.5-degree arc—that’s a field of view 100 times wider than JWST’s—Rubin can see the big picture across the entire southern sky. And then tell JWST where to focus its narrower, infrared sensor, which can glean an object’s temperature and material makeup. “It is likely we will discover interesting objects for JWST to follow up on,” Gill said.
Bernardinelli said he’d focus Rubin on the smaller, speedier and weirder objects in the solar system; as well as the bigger, slower and equally weird objects that lie farthe solar system. Up close: comets and asteroids. Far away: flickering “variable” stars and supernovae., Bernardinelli said. Potentially 100 miles wide, Bernardinelli-Bernstein—“B-B,” as it’s known—might be the biggest
Rubin could be just the thing. “When the Vera Rubin Observatory starts its mission in 2023, it’ll take lots and lots of images of this and other objects, so we’ll basically have a ‘video’ of its evolution for almost 10 years.”