From a mountaintop in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has taken the first public images of the cosmos, which represent the start of the observatory’s 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which it will capture each and every night. With the world’s largest digital camera, this new observatory will sweep the entire southern sky every three nights. In its first image, it covered 10 million galaxies in the universe and showed only one section, 0.05%, of the roughly 40 billion celestial objects that it will ultimately observe. The scientific world has been abuzz with speculation about discoveries to come.

Rubin Observatory Captures 54M-Light-Year Virgo Cluster, Unveils Hidden Galaxies and Star Birth Regions

As per a report by Space.com, the picture shows the Virgo cluster, which is some 54 million light years away. The observatory’s 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope and advanced LSST Science Pipelines software enabled the capture of breathtaking detail across a region 45 times the size of the full Moon. The scientists have called the images groundbreaking, and the observatory is expected to be able to tell them in real time about variable stars, supernovas, and even asteroids.

Rubin’s sensitivity to changes in brightness, scientists hope, will allow it to catch transient cosmic events, such as stars that die and planets that cross in front of other stars. Such sightings will enable measurements of cosmic distances and provide vital data for investigations of dark matter and dark energy — two of the most mysterious and poorly understood forces in the universe.

Preview images, such as the views of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae, showed spectacular structures created by star birth inside dense cloud cores. The observatory’s unique capability to produce continuous wide-field images promises a dynamic, decade-long “movie of the universe”.

With LSST now launching, astronomers are bristling with excitement to see what comes from the survey that might topple our best understanding of the universe. The researchers involved have mentioned that they are “beyond excited” about what they might learn in the next few years.