Seeing stars

Test images from the world’s largest digital astronomical camera show light from millions of distant stars and galaxies, plus 2,104 previously unseen asteroids, CNN reported.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s (VCRO) first images and video clip of the stars were shared on 23 June on the YouTube channel of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the camera and the facility’s construction together with the United States Department of Energy.

The video shows about 10 million galaxies captured by the VCRO’s wide-view camera from a distance of 9,000 light years during 10 hours of observation, according to BBC and CNN. It will record 20 billion galaxies every three nights in the next 10 years.

Installed on top of the 2,682-meter Cerro Pachón mountain in central Chile in March and run by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under a cooperative agreement with the NSF, the camera’s resolution is 3,200 megapixels -- 67 times more than an iPhone 16 Pro camera -- and would require 400 ultra high definition TV screens to show a single image, BBC reports.

Using the VCRO, astronomers could see stars as far as 1.2 million light years away, according to the BBC.

Meanwhile, speaking of great distances, an insect in Australia can migrate 1,000 kilometers at night without getting lost.

The Bogong moth flies from all over southeastern Australia to the cool caves in the Australian Alps in the spring and leaves the mountain range in the fall to mate and die, CNN reports.

To determine how the insects don’t lose their direction, researchers conducted an experiment in the lab where the magnetic field was removed to force the moths to use the stars for navigation.

“They’re able to use the stars as a compass to find a specific geographic direction to navigate, and this is a first for invertebrates,” said Eric Warrant, head of the Division of Sensory Biology at Lund University in Sweden and a co-author of the study on the moths’ stargazing behavior published on 18 June in the journal Nature.

“A little moth can’t see many stars because its eye has a pupil that is only about 1/10th the width of our own pupil at night. But it turns out that because of the optics of their eyes they’re able to see that dim, nocturnal world about 15 times more brightly than we do, which is fantastic because they would be able to see the Milky Way much more vividly,” CNN quoted Warrant as saying.

He said the Bogong moth’s nighttime navigational skill is even more extraordinary in that the insect only makes the migration once in its life, meaning its talent must be innate.