Universe News (miscellaneous articles)

[DocM]

The US's SR-72 hypersonic strike/recon aircraft may be coming out of the dark.

 

First Aviation Week poss an article saying it's close (uhhh, yeah....been here before - remember Have Blue and the F-117?)

 

http://m.aviationweek.com/defense/skunk-works-hints-sr-72-demonstrator-progress
 

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Skunk Works Hints At SR-72 Demonstrator Progress

>

However, Weiss hints that work on a combined cycle propulsion system and other key advances needed for a viable hypersonic vehicle are reaching readiness levels sufficient for incorporation into some form of demonstrator. Following critical ground demonstrator tests from 2013 through 2017, Lockheed Martin is believed to be on track to begin development of an optionally piloted flight research vehicle (FRV) starting as early as next year. The FRV is expected to be around the same size as an F-22 and powered by a full-scale, combined cycle engine.

>

“The combined cycle work is still occurring and obviously a big breakthrough in the air-breathing side of hypersonics is the propulsion system,” Weiss adds. “So this is not just on combined cycle but on other elements of propulsion system.”
The technology of the “air breather has been matured and work is continuing on those capabilities to demonstrate that they are ready to go and be fielded,” he adds.

>

 

 

But aviation sleuth Tyler Rogoway says it may already be here,

 

 

[Unobscured Vision]

Probably using the Sabre Gen-2 platform, among other things. That's likely to be the only way it'll be able to do some of the stuff the DOD will want it to do.

 

... and why Boeing isn't going ape#### over SpaceX's recent wins on the Mil/Gov launch contracts. It's likely that Boeing already has its' sights set on these technologies and has "moved on" from using Rockets. If that's the case, then holy [snip][snippity][snip] are things gonna be interesting in the Aerospace Industry. Not that they weren't, but ... damn. This is a new level of "duuuuuuuuude ....".

 

The "SR-72" is likely just the beginning. And yes, all of these projects are going to be SC/NTK/SA++ Clearance levels. Bet on it.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

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Betelgeuse captured by ALMA

 

 

This orange blob shows the nearby star Betelgeuse, as seen by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This is the first time that ALMA has ever observed the surface of a star and this first attempt has resulted in the highest-resolution image of Betelgeuse available.

 

Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars currently known — with a radius around 1400 times larger than the Sun’s in the millimeter continuum. About 600 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), the red supergiant burns brightly, causing it to have only a short life expectancy. The star is just about eight million years old, but is already on the verge of becoming a supernova. When that happens, the resulting explosion will be visible from Earth, even in broad daylight.

 

/snip

 

Full article at European Southern Observatory

 

Most detailed observation of a star (other than our sun).  Betelgeuse is located about 640 light years away (about 3.76 quadrillion miles away) in the Orion constellation ... and is huge (1500x larger than our sun).  If it were in our solar system, its outer shell (photosphere) would extend beyond Jupiter's orbit.

 

Further reading at Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

 

 

 

 

^ reaction to this latest Betelgeuse image.

[DocM]

 

[Jim K Global Moderator]

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This Is the Smallest Star Ever Discovered

 

 

Astronomers have discovered a star 600 light-years away that stretches the definition of what can even be considered a star. That's because EBLM J0555-57Ab, the smallest star ever discovered, is the size of a planet—specifically, it's just a hair bigger than Saturn.

 

But the star 57Ab is much more massive than Saturn. In fact, it's 85 times the mass of Jupiter, which makes it just massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium and become a true star. Because of its small radius, though, it was initially caught up in a case of mistaken identity.

 

57Ab is part of a triple star system. While the sun-mass stars EBLM J0555-57A and EBLM J0555-57B orbit around each other, 57Ab orbits only the primary star. 57Ab's small size in comparison to its sun-like companions led researchers to conclude initially that the planet-sized star was just that, a planet. The star's mistaken classification occurred in part because it was detected by transit—the general method for finding exoplanets—where one body passes in front of another and dims some of the light from the background object.

 

Everything about the light curve suggested a planet. "Indeed, until we measured the mass it looked just like a transiting planet," said Amaury Triaud, a Kavli Institute fellow at the University of Cambridge and an author on the paper published today in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

 

//

 

Now that EBLM J0555-57Ab is officially the smallest star ever discovered, you can bet that more astronomers will be turning their telescopes to observe the strange Saturn-sized star and learn more about these mysterious ultracool objects, treading the line between planethood and stardom.

 

 

More at Popular Mechanics

 

Should name it ... Littlegeuse

 

[DocM]

Littlegeuse - I like that 

 

The theoretical  lower mass boundary for a true star is about .07 solar masses. 57Ab is .081 solar masses, so even smaller micro-stars are bound to be out there. 

 

 

[Unobscured Vision]

There's some theoretical supposition that suggests that ultra low-mass stars like these are small like this because of the gravitational compression that formed them, and that as they consume that first 1 or 2 JM worth of fuel they then swell up slightly as those convection processes begin to stabilize and their energy output becomes higher.

 

What's more interesting to me is that this star is in a Binary system (Trinary, now). I'll take a look at the star catalog and get an age on this system and see what's what. Then we'll be able to say for sure whether this star is very young or very old.

[DocM]

Given the low burn rate of small stars like red dwarfs I'm betting on old. Maybe very, very old.

[Unobscured Vision]

Only thing I could really dig up about EBLM J0555-57Ab was on the preprint server. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08781 is the article and link to the submission ... good stuff if you want hard scientific data.

 

In other news ... speaking of hardcore scientific data. Trappist-1 is back in the news. Two items of note.

 

1.) Age of Trappist-1 system determined, and it's possibly 2x older than our solar system. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.02018 (also a preprint server link);

 

A good read in of itself, and yeah, it's still an infant in the cosmic scheme of things considering that it'll probably outlive all other stars except others LIKE it, and ...

 

2.) Planets in systems like Trappist-1 are likely to have their atmospheres destroyed due to several unfavorable circumstances occurring simultaneously.
Citation A: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/physical-constraints-on-the-likelihood-of-life-on-exoplanets/627F73CC6130BE664D6E16FF4EB66F52/core-reader (slow but WILL load, is a fantastic read and worth waiting for)

Citation B: https://www.space.com/37530-trappist-1-planets-atmospheres-stripped.html

 

Sadly, magnetic field reconnects from stars and "uhh, that thing IS a UV/X-Ray omni-directional laser at this distance" from that same star are deal-breakers ... falls into the category of "anything extreme that the star does and you're too close to it".

 

Enjoy!

 

[Unobscured Vision]

My favorite star-forming region in the Local Group has finally been "weighed" ... and it's heavy, maaan ...  

 

Weighing massive stars in nearby galaxy reveals excess of heavyweights

The Large Magellanic Cloud. Credit: NASA

Article link | phys.org website

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An international team of astronomers has revealed an 'astonishing' overabundance of massive stars in a neighbouring galaxy.

 

The discovery, made in the gigantic star-forming region 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, has 'far-reaching' consequences for our understanding of how stars transformed the pristine Universe into the one we live in today.

 

The results are published in the journal Science.

 

Lead author Fabian Schneider, a Hintze Research Fellow in the University of Oxford's Department of Physics, said: 'We were astonished when we realised that 30 Doradus has formed many more massive stars than expected.'

 

As part of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS), the team used ESO's Very Large Telescope to observe nearly 1,000 massive stars in 30 Doradus, a gigantic stellar nursery also known as the Tarantula nebula. The team used detailed analyses of about 250 stars with masses between 15 and 200 times the mass of our Sun to determine the distribution of massive stars born in 30 Doradus - the so-called initial mass function (IMF).

 

Massive stars are particularly important for astronomers because of their enormous influence on their surroundings (known as their 'feedback'). They can explode in spectacular supernovae at the end of their lives, forming some of the most exotic objects in the Universe - neutron stars and black holes.

 

Co-author Hugues Sana from the University of Leuven in Belgium said: 'We have not only been surprised by the sheer number of massive stars, but also that their IMF is densely sampled up to 200 solar masses.' Until recently, the existence of stars up to 200 solar masses was highly disputed, and the study shows that a maximum birth mass of stars of 200-300 solar masses appears likely. (emphasis added)

(read more at the 'article link', above.)

Those will be the Wolf-Rayet stars that have been observed in the Tarantula Nebula and the surrounding area ... and with those kinds of masses they might even be too large to supernova. The so-called "instant black hole" thing could happen with them .... hmm.

[LOC Veteran]

Pair-instability Supernova indeed

[DocM]

Observe closely, from very far away 

[Unobscured Vision]

9 hours ago, LOC said:

Pair-instability Supernova indeed

Oh yeah.  All of the gravitational interactions going on at those masses?! Yeesh .. let the bodies hit the floor. It's gotta be like Fight Club in that 50x50x50 LY space. There certainly won't be any habitable worlds within 200 LY of all of that disruption going on. The radiation and emission environment alone makes Chernobyl look like the Garden of Eden by comparison.

8 hours ago, DocM said:

Observe closely, from very far away 

From very far away, with those masses/energies. Even as supernovae go, those'd be some doozies. Thankfully we're > 175,000 LY away. Be a helluva show, though.  

[Unobscured Vision]

There's been quite a bit of movement in the study of Trappist-1 -- our newest, favorite seven-planet system. Well, mine anyway. 

 

New Clues to Compositions of TRAPPIST-1 Planets

Article Link | JPL-Caltech/NASA Site

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(Updated statistics & Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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(I'll spare you all the background information. If you're interested about Trappist-1, you already know why it's special ... I'll cut to the meat of the new findings.)

 

TRAPPIST-1b, the innermost planet, is likely to have a rocky core, surrounded by an atmosphere much thicker than Earth's.

 

TRAPPIST-1c also likely has a rocky interior, but with a thinner atmosphere than planet b.

 

TRAPPIST-1d is the lightest of the planets -- about 30 percent the mass of Earth. Scientists are uncertain whether it has a large atmosphere, an ocean or an ice layer -- all three of these would give the planet an "envelope" of volatile substances, which would make sense for a planet of its density.

 

Scientists were surprised that TRAPPIST-1e is the only planet in the system slightly denser than Earth, suggesting it may have a denser iron core than our home planet. Like TRAPPIST-1c, it does not necessarily have a thick atmosphere, ocean or ice layer -- making these two planets distinct in the system. It is mysterious why TRAPPIST-1e has a much rockier composition than the rest of the planets. In terms of size, density and the amount of radiation it receives from its star, this is the most similar planet to Earth.

 

TRAPPIST-1f, g and h are far enough from the host star that water could be frozen as ice across these surfaces. If they have thin atmospheres, they would be unlikely to contain the heavy molecules of Earth, such as carbon dioxide.

Denser iron core + a decent ocean = a VERY robust magnetic field. And with a star like Trappist-1 it's gonna need one if it'll have any chance of being habitable. Distance from the star isn't so much of a factor past 1:1 with Earth; in fact the further the better in this case. The atmosphere (and there will be one) will be able to hold onto the energy it receives without being "cooked", and should be fairly efficient at radiating that energy off into space like Earth does; Unlike Mars (which can't hang onto it). Trappist-1e should be in quite a decent location.

 

I bet the Planetary Scientists are having quite a field day with this system ... JWST (if it ever gets launched) should be able to do some great science on this place.

[Unobscured Vision]

Well ... this is a big deal.

 

Researchers find last of universe's missing ordinary matter

Article link | Phys.org website

Quote

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have helped to find the last reservoir of ordinary matter hiding in the universe.

 

Ordinary matter, or "baryons," make up all physical objects in existence, from stars to the cores of black holes. But until now, astrophysicists had only been able to locate about two-thirds of the matter that theorists predict was created by the Big Bang.

 

In the new research, an international team pinned down the missing third, finding it in the space between galaxies. That lost matter exists as filaments of oxygen gas at temperatures of around 1 million degrees Celsius, said CU Boulder's Michael Shull, a co-author of the study.
[...]
The team found the signatures of a type of highly-ionized oxygen gas lying between the quasar and our solar system—and at a high enough density to, when extrapolated to the entire universe, account for the last 30 percent of ordinary matter.

(read the particulars at the source link above.)

I'm surprised that there isn't an abundance of ionized Hydrogen being detected too, but at those temperatures and distances those L-alpha signatures would be extremely red-shifted almost to the point of non-detectability -- which would explain why they haven't been seen already.

 

So, folks. "Dark matter" isn't actually dark matter after all. Neat. 

[Jim K Global Moderator]

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First Confirmed Image of Newborn Planet Caught with ESO’s VLT

 

SPHERE, a planet-hunting instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, has captured the first confirmed image of a planet caught in the act of forming in the dusty disc surrounding a young star. The young planet is carving a path through the primordial disc of gas and dust around the very young star PDS 70. The data suggest that the planet’s atmosphere is cloudy.

 

Astronomers led by a group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany have captured a spectacular snapshot of planetary formation around the young dwarf star PDS 70. By using the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) — one of the most powerful planet-hunting instruments in existence — the international team has made the first robust detection of a young planet, named PDS 70b, cleaving a path through the planet-forming material surrounding the young star.

 

The SPHERE instrument also enabled the team to measure the brightness of the planet at different wavelengths, which allowed properties of its atmosphere to be deduced.

 

The planet stands out very clearly in the new observations, visible as a bright point to the right of the blackened centre of the image. It is located roughly three billion kilometres from the central star, roughly equivalent to the distance between Uranus and the Sun. The analysis shows that PDS 70b is a giant gas planet with a mass a few times that of Jupiter. The planet's surface has a temperature of around 1000°C, making it much hotter than any planet in our own Solar System.

 

/snip

 

Full article at ESO

 

 

I didn't see it in the article, but PDS 70 (the dwarf star) is 370 light years away from us and is 5-10 million years "old" (which is really young)

[Unobscured Vision]

Neat!

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Gas and Dust Seen Swirling Around our Galaxy’s Supermassive Black Hole

 

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At the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy lurks a Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) named Sagittarius A* (Sag. A-star). Sag. A* is an object of intense study, even though you can’t actually see it. But new images from the Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array (ALMA) reveal swirling high-speed clouds of gas and dust orbiting the black hole, the next best thing to seeing the hole itself.

The clouds of gas and dust are called molecular cloudlets. They’re the type of material that stars form from, but these cloudlets are much too small to form stars. Their mass is only about 60 times greater than our Sun. Plus, they’re in a difficult place for stars to form: the circumnuclear disc (CND).

// The circle depicts the black hole...

 

 

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The cavity itself is only about 3.5 light years across. It’s a chaotic place, where the overwhelming power of the black hole’s gravity draws all gas and dust towards it, speeding it up to relativistic speeds as it does so. The central cavity refers to the innermost parsed of the galaxy, hosting the SMBH, the nuclear stellar cluster, and prominent streams of interstellar ionized gas. The inner edge of the CND lies at about 1.5 parsecs from the Sagittarius A-star. Any material orbiting inside the cavity and close to Sag. A* is expected to move at high velocities.

 

This ALMA image shows the central 2 parsecs of the Milky Way, with Sag. A* circled in the middle. Blue represents carbon monoxide and red represent hydrogen cyanide. The dotted blue and lines represent inner and outer circular orbits around the black hole. The dotted green lines represent elliptical orbits previously proposed to fit the motion of the ionized gas streamers. The motions of the CO and HCN cloudlets follow neither orbit. Image: ALMA, Goicoechea et. al. 2019.

 

 

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The team thinks that these newly-observed cloudlets are either leftovers of more massive molecular clouds that fall into the cavity and are tidally disrupted, or that they originate from instabilities in the inner rim of the CND that lead to fragmentation and in-fall from there. Either way, they are now an understood part of the chaotic environment inside the inner cavity.

According to the paper, these newly-observed cloudlets don’t last long. That’s not surprising considering their proximity to the black hole and all that goes on near it. They’re subject to photoevaporation by the intense stellar radiation field, blown away by winds from massive stars in the central cluster, or disrupted by strong gravitational shears.

 

 

This image shows red and magenta carbon monoxide cloudlets around the central black hole. The black contour lines are the ionized gas streamers, the dominant structure this close to the black hole. The cloudlets don’t conform to the orbits and velocities of the streams of gas. Image: ALMA, Goicoechea et. al. 2019.

 

More at the link...

https://www.universetoday.com/140325/gas-and-dust-seen-swirling-around-our-galaxys-supermassive-black-hole/#more-140325

 

[Unobscured Vision]

Whoa! VERY cool!

[Draggendrop Veteran]

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"Jaw-dropping" is a much-abused term, but my mouth hung open when I saw this solar-eclipse photo that just won an Astronomy Photographer of the Year award. https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/2018/overall-winners … (Photo: Nicolas Lefaudeux)

https://twitter.com/coreyspowell/status/1055520794611273741

 

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Nicolas Lefaudeux

 

Nikon D810 camera, AF S NIKKOR 105mm f/1.4E ED lens at 105 mm f/1.4, untracked tripod, ISO 64, multiple exposures of 0.3-second, 0.6-second and 1.3-second

Check out the other category winners for 2018..amazing shots...

https://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/astronomy-photographer-year/galleries/2018/overall-winners

[Draggendrop Veteran]

ANCIENT STAR FOUND THAT’S ONLY SLIGHTLY YOUNGER THAN THE UNIVERSE ITSELF

 

Image Credit: ESO/Beletsky/DSS1 + DSS2 + 2MASS

 

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According to the most widely-accepted cosmological theory, the first stars in our Universe formed roughly 150 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Over time, these stars began to come together to form globular clusters, which slowly coalesced to form the first galaxies – including our very own Milky Way. For some time, astronomers have held that this process began for our galaxy some 13.51 billion years ago.

 

In accordance with this theory, astronomers believed that the oldest stars in the Universe were short-lived massive ones that have since died. However, a team of astronomers from Johns Hopking University recently discovered a low-mass star in the Milky Way’s “thin disk” that is roughly 13.5 billion-year-old. This discovery indicates that some of the earliest stars in the Universe could be alive, and available for study.

 

This star was discovered as a companion to 2MASS J18082002–5104378, a subgiant that is roughly 1,950 light-years from Earth (in the constellation Ara) and has a low metal content (metallicity). When it was first observed in 2016, the discovery team noted unusual behavior which they attributed to the existence of an invisible companion – possibly a neutron star or a black hole.

 

Artist’s impression of a binary star system consisting of a red giant and a neutron star. - Image Credit: ESO/M. Garlick/University of Warwick

 

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For the sake of their study, which was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, the John Hopkins team observed this star system between 2016 and 2017 using the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. After observing spectra from the system, they were able to discern the presence of an extremely faint secondary star, which has since been designated 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B.

 

Combined with radial velocity measurements of its primary, which yielded mass estimates, the team determined that the star is an low mass, extremely-low metallicity star. Based on its low metal content, they also determined that it is 13.5 billion years old, making it the oldest ultra metal-poor star discovered to date. This means that in cosmic terms, the star is a single generation removed from the Big Bang.

 

As Kevin Schlaufman – an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and the lead author of the study – indicated in a JHU Hub press release, this was an extremely unexpected find. “This star is maybe one in 10 million,” he said. “It tells us something very important about the first generations of stars.”

 

While astronomers have found 30 ancient ultra metal-poor stars in the past , each of them had the approximate mass of the Sun. The star Schlaufman and his team found, however, was only 14% the mass of the Sun (making it an M-type red dwarf). In addition, all the previously-discovered ultra-low metallicity stars in our galaxy were found to have orbits that generally took them far the galactic plane.

 

Artist’s impression of Population 3 stars born over 13 billion years ago – the earliest, oldest and presumably now extinct star types. - Image Credit: NASA.

 

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However, this newly-discovered star system orbits our galaxy on a circular orbit (like our Sun), which keeps its relatively close to plane. This discovery challenges a number of astronomical conventions, and also opens up some very interesting possibilities for astronomers.

 

For instance, astronomers have long theorized that the earliest stars to form after the Big Bang (known as Population III stars) would have been composed entirely of the most basic elements – i.e. hydrogen, helium, and small amounts of lithium. These stars then produced heavier elements in their cores which were released into the Universe when they reached the end of their lifespans and exploded as supernovae.

 

The next generation of stars to form were primarily composed of the same basic elements, but also included clouds of these heavier elements from the previous generation of stars into their makeup. These stars created more heavy elements which they then released at the end of their lifespans, gradually increasing the metallicity of stars in the Universe with every subsequent generation.

 

In short, astronomers believed until as recently as the late 1990s that all the earliest stars (which would have been massive and short-lived) are long extinct. In recent decades, astronomical simulations have been conducted that have indicated that low-mass stars from the earliest generation could still exist. Unlike giant stars, low-mass dwarfs (such as red dwarfs) can live for up to trillions of years.

more at the link...

https://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2018/11/11/ancient-star-found-thats-only-slightly-younger-than-the-universe-itself

 

[Unobscured Vision]

Oooooh ... this is one that'll answer a ton of questions, like:

 

- Did the MWG form early or later?

- What are the characteristics of an M-Dwarf star at this stage of its' life cycle (internal conditions, flaring, etc.)?

- Did M-Dwarf stars actually form this early, or are these stars the result of mass loss via siblings?

- How common are they (now that we're finding them we can begin the statistical estimates)?

- How are they any different from metal-rich M-Dwarf stars, having formed/been produced that early?

 

Fascinating.  Thanks @Draggendrop!

[Draggendrop Veteran]

If you are at an appointment and things are running late.....

 

Emily Levesque Public Lecture: The Weirdest Stars in the Universe

 

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Published on Mar 8, 2018

 

In her March 7 public lecture at Perimeter Institute, Emily Levesque discusses the history of stellar astronomy, present-day observing techniques and exciting new discoveries, and explores some of the most puzzling and bizarre objects being studied by astronomers today.

video is 1:08:46

 

 

 

[LOC Veteran]

Hey now I just watched that talk a couple of days ago! She was like me back in college, super excited about all of this incredible stuff and super eager to learn more. As they say in the comments, pretty infectious actually. Sadly though (though probably not to her actually lol) the last star she talked about, the TZO (which is a stable Neutron Star/Red Giant/Super Giant with the Neutron Star as the core....which blows my mind) that she brings up specifically has as of now been looked at more and more and is seemingly not a TZO (for now heh).

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Putting this article here...it's results will end up here...

 

We Visited the World's Largest Digital Camera and Damn

 

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The devil’s in the details when you head inside a cleanroom. Everything you plan on bringing inside, from your phone to your camera tripod, needs to be wiped down with lint-free wipes. You need to put on a special bunny suit. If you put the gloves on wrong, you need to throw them away and get a new pair. You absolutely cannot touch your bare skin with those gloves—they could pick up oils, dead skin cells, and who knows what else. It felt like I spent as much time getting ready to enter the room as I did inside the room itself—but that’s probably because I had to change my gloves so many times.

 

But that’s a small price to pay to visit a 3.2 gigapixel digital camera, the largest one ever built. It’s the size of a small car, with a table-sized focal plane. This digital camera will live inside the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, currently under construction, that will sit high in the dry air of the Andean foothills in Chile. The camera will allow the telescope to perform a task as monumental as its size: photographing the stars every night in order to create two full views of the entire southern hemisphere’s sky per week. The scientists behind the project seek to understand the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and other astronomical mysteries.

 

The LSST will be the most advanced survey of the night sky yet. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which peers at individual objects or small patches of the sky, the LSST will create a movie of the entire night sky. Light that suddenly appears out of darkness could signal a supernova, and other changes could indicate the presence of the universe’s mysterious gravitational scaffolding, called dark matter, or the force driving it apart, called dark energy.

 

You might wonder what makes this behemoth a “digital camera.” It helps to break a digital camera into its component parts: a lens directs light onto a sensor, turning the light into an electrical signal and then into data stored on a computer. Your iPhone’s camera sensor is somewhere around 7 or 12 mega, or million, pixels, while a DSLR can have somewhere from 18 to 50 megapixels. The LSST will have 189 16-megapixel chips, all aligned on a perfectly flat plane.

more at the link...

https://gizmodo.com/we-visited-the-worlds-largest-digital-camera-and-damn-1830467771

 

World's Largest Digital Camera | Gizmodo

video is 4:02 min.

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It’s the size of a small car, with a table-sized focal plane, this 3.2 gigapixel digital camera is the largest one ever built. It is going to be installed in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to get incredibly detailed images of the night sky.