See the First Breathtaking Images Captured by the Powerful New Telescope at the Rubin Observatory
Featuring never-before-seen views of galaxies and more than 2,100 newly discovered asteroids, the observations are only a taste of what to expect from the telescope’s upcoming decade-long survey
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Scientists at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have unveiled the highly anticipated first images taken by its powerful telescope, and they’re stunning.
Perched atop a mountain in Chile, the observatory is equipped with the largest digital camera on Earth: the 3.2-gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera, which is the size of a car. Installed on the observatory’s Simonyi Survey telescope, it will take snapshots of the night sky every several seconds once its scientific mission begins. Rubin’s observations will be stitched together to build a time-lapse record of outer space, creating what has been called “the greatest cosmic movie ever made.”
Need to know: Rubin Observatory sky survey
- Once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s survey begins later this year, it will image an area of sky the size of about 45 full moons every 30 seconds, then spend five seconds moving to its next target.
- It will scan the entire southern sky every three nights over the next decade.
On Monday, the Rubin team unveiled a sneak peak of the observatory’s capabilities, before it starts its decade-long astronomical survey in earnest later this year. “Releasing our first scientific imagery marks an extraordinary milestone for … Rubin Observatory. It represents the culmination of about two decades of dedication, innovation and collaboration by a global team,” says Željko Ivezić, Rubin’s director of construction, in a statement. “With construction now complete, we’re turning our eyes fully to the sky—not just to take images, but to begin a whole new era of discovery.”
The images represent just over ten hours of test observations and a fraction of Rubin’s full field of view, and scientists are already excited about the next ten years of the telescope’s potential. The first photos include never-before-seen views of structures in the Virgo cluster, a group of galaxies about 55 million light-years away.
“The Virgo cluster images are breathtaking,” says Christian Aganze, a galactic archaeologist at Stanford University, to Paola Rosa-Aquino at National Geographic. “The level of detail, from the large-scale merging galaxies to details in the spiral structure of individual galaxies, more distant galaxies in the background, foreground Milky Way stars, all in one image, is transformative!”
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Rubin has already found more than 2,100 new asteroids in our solar system, including seven near-Earth asteroids that pose no danger to our planet. These revelations offer a taste of more discoveries to come: By the end of its mission, the observatory is expected to have found over five million new asteroids.
“It sounds crude, but it’s that expression, shooting fish in a barrel,” says Mario Jurić, an astronomer at the University of Washington working on Rubin’s strategy to find asteroids, to Kenneth Chang at the New York Times. “It feels almost unfair how good this telescope is.”
At the end of its run, Rubin will have captured billions of objects, including galaxies, stars and supernovas. That’s an estimated 20 terabytes of data every night, and the staggering data set will only get bigger once the images have been processed, analyzed and cataloged.
“It’s going to be revolutionary,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at Carnegie Science, to Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR. “Astronomers are going to change from observing little areas of the sky to basically data mining. It’s going to be like a firehose of data coming in. There’s going to be all kinds of stuff in there and we’re going to have to sift through it to find everything.”
You can take a look at the full set of images and videos from the Rubin Observatory here.
