Two spectacular stellar nurseries—the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae—have been revealed in dazzling detail in one of the first public images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Located 4,000 light-years from Earth, these distant clouds of gas and dust mark the debut of the observatory’s scientific capabilities. Released during a livestream on June 23, the images offer a vivid preview of what the observatory will capture over the next decade from its high-altitude post atop Cerro Pachón in Chile’s Andes, using the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to explore cosmic evolution.

Rubin Observatory to Scan Southern Sky Every 3 Nights, Mapping Galaxies and Dark Matter

As per observatory director Željko Ivezić, the image sets demonstrate the facility’s wide field of view and ability to operate in the “time domain”—detecting changes in space over time. During a watch party in Washington, D.C., Ivezić noted the diversity of celestial objects captured, from nearby bright stars to distant red elliptical galaxies. At a June 9 briefing, Princeton University astronomer Yusra AlSayyad described the Rubin Observatory’s advanced image processing and its role in enabling rapid discovery across vast sky segments.

The observatory, which over the next decade will take in the whole southern sky every three or four nights, features a giant self-adjusting telescope as well as a car-size digital camera, the largest ever built. About 1,000 images will be taken nightly during each 30-second exposure. This quick cadence gives scientists the ability to detect millions of transient objects, such as asteroids, supernovae, and possibly unknown phenomena as they happen.

Along the way, the observatory is also going to help map out galaxies and star systems and the distribution of dark matter, an invisible material that makes up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe. The observatory is named for the astronomer Vera Rubin, who gathered crucial data proving the existence of dark matter in the 1970s. “We are hopeful that we will be gathering more data later this year after construction is done.”

The U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, and the Rubin Observatory, promise to transform the field of astronomy. The project, as telescope scientist Sandrine Thomas says, is poised to revolutionise cosmic research, and it’s going to bring the general public along, in real time, for the story of the universe as it happens.