Distant nebulas star in one of the first images from the Rubin Observatory
The facility will scan the entire southern sky every few nights
The Lagoon Nebula (center) and Trifid Nebula (top right) are featured in one of the Rubin Observatory’s first publicly released images. This picture combines almost 700 separate images captured by the facility across seven hours. The observatory will begin a 10-year survey of the southern sky in late 2025.
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
Clouds of gas and dust swirl within a nebula 5,000 light-years away, seen in more detail than ever before. With this view of the Lagoon Nebula — and the much farther Trifid Nebula in the upper right — the Vera C. Rubin Observatory makes its public debut.
This image and others unveiled in a livestream June 23 offer just a glimpse of what the observatory will capture over the next 10 years from its perch atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the Chilean Andes.
“Rubin Observatory’s main feature is its opening of the time domain and its enormous field of view,” said astronomer Yusra AlSayyad of Princeton University, who oversees image processing at the observatory, during a June 9 news briefing. The first publicly released images showcase those capabilities, she said.
The facility will scan the entire southern sky every three to four nights in an effort called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST. It’ll do that using a self-adjusting telescope with a car-sized digital camera — the largest ever built — that snaps a photo every 30 seconds, resulting in around 1,000 images each night.
“It will enable us to explore galaxies, stars in the Milky Way, objects in the solar system, and all in a truly new way,” Aaron Roodman, an astrophysicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in California who oversees the observatory’s camera, said during the June 9 briefing. “Since we take images of the night sky so quickly and so often, we’ll detect millions of changing objects literally every night.”
Over the next decade, the observatory will also map dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up around 85 percent of the matter in the universe. The facility’s namesake, Vera Rubin, provided the first convincing evidence that the mysterious stuff exists in the 1970s. She died in 2016.
Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, the Rubin Observatory has been under construction for over a decade and should be completed later this year. That’s also when data collection is slated to begin.
The amount of data gathered within the LSST’s first year will be greater than that compiled by all other observatories combined. But that information will also benefit those facilities.
“We are complementary to almost every other astronomical and astrophysics instrument,” Roodman said. In addition to providing data of its own, the new observatory will act as a discovery machine to spot interesting phenomena that can help guide where researchers direct their attention.
“The Rubin Observatory will really, truly change the way the astronomy community will conduct research,” astronomer Sandrine Thomas, the observatory’s telescope project scientist, said at the June 9 briefing. “And in addition, we’ll be able to bring the public along.”
