[Source: Reuters]

Perched atop a mountain in Chile’s Coquimbo region, where some of the world’s darkest skies stretch over the Andes, a giant ​observatory has begun filming the infinite to create the first movie ‌of the universe.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a joint program of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab and the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, officially launched its ​decade-long survey of the night sky on June 29.

Equipped with a massive ​3.2-billion-pixel camera, the facility will photograph the entire visible southern sky ⁠every three to four nights, generating a constantly updated record of cosmic ​change.

“Rubin is a new way of really looking at the universe,” said Stuartt Corder, ​mission scientist for AURA in Chile and deputy director of NOIRLab.

“It’s providing a sort of a movie of the night sky instead of snapshots of small parts of the sky, ​which is how traditional astronomy has been done.”

Rubin will repeatedly scan vast portions ​of the sky, tracking how stars, galaxies, and other objects evolve over time, which Corder ‌says ⁠will give a dynamic view of how measurements and objects are changing.

Astronomers will be alerted when a star explodes, an asteroid passes nearby or an unfamiliar object suddenly appears, and be able to track it.

Researchers also hope Rubin will help ​unravel some of ​the universe’s biggest ⁠mysteries, including gathering more information on dark matter and dark energy, while also creating a “census” of objects in our solar ​system and the galaxy.

Corder expects the observatory to help scientists ​observe more ⁠asteroids from other solar systems and provide a deeper understanding of our own.

“We’ll really get an understanding of maybe what is the difference in composition of our ⁠solar system ​as compared to other solar systems from these ​rocks that just happened to be flying through because they got thrown out of their solar ​system,” Corder said.