World’s most powerful telescope reveals best images yet of universe

The first images from the world's most powerful telescope and captured by the largest digital camera ever built were released Monday

Take a look. These are images of faraway galaxies, cosmic dust clouds and asteroids tearing through space

Scientists say these are among the greatest images ever seen by the human eye and more than a million more are yet to come

This is one of the world's biggest telescopes, twinned with the world's biggest camera, about to embark on a 10 year mission to see everything that goes whiz, flash, bang in the night, creating a movie of everything that moves

And at the same time, building up the deepest, widest image of the cosmos that we've ever made

Now, to make a camera that big, this thing is absolutely huge

It's about the size of a small car. The lens in it is also the world's biggest lens, has a Guinness World Book record

It's about the, if you put it on its side, the lens is about the height of an average woman

So this thing is absolutely huge. It's part of a decade-long effort to survey the universe at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile

Astronomers promise it will be a history-making period of space exploration and discovery

as the telescope embarks on its mission to collect incredible images of the universe in all its glory

In just 10 hours, the observatory discovered more than 2,100 previously undetected asteroids

including seven relatively close to Earth. Don't worry. Astronomers say those ones are not a current threat to our planet

More images are expected to show an estimated 90 new near asteroids which would be double the number currently known by scientists One of the first top science priorities for this mission is to map out all of the asteroids in our universe to map their path their trajectory

And hopefully, fingers crossed, we won't find any on a direct collision course

But if we do, that's when we start mobilizing the Planetary Defense Force, which is already in play

You know, we've already managed to deflect an asteroid out in space. Positioned in the Andes, the U.S.-led observatory is fitted with the most high-tech telescope ever created and world's largest digital camera

This telescope is being sighted in Chile, one of the best observing places in the world

So we don't have to worry about the Scottish clouds that I sit under here in Scotland

And it's very dry, perfect conditions in which to make these regular observations on repeat

night after night after night, to see where things are changing absolutely everywhere across the night sky

And you can't do that from these beautiful telescopes that we have up in space

The telescope and camera will survey the entire southern sky. And to do that, you need a really, really big telescope, which is exactly what they've built

plus a really wide camera that allows us to map the entire visible sky every three to four days

So every three to four days, we sort of look across the sky and then we go back and we do it again and again and again

Astronomers also expect to learn more about asteroids, comets, exploding stars, new planets

the mystery behind dark matter and energy and more. The effort will include trillions of measurements of billions of space objects, some far beyond our galaxy

The observatory will compile roughly 1.5 million images featuring some 10 billion stars and galaxies over 10 years

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