In this immense image NSF-Doe Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a brand new view of two old friends: the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. The image provides a demonstration of what makes Rubin unique: its combination of an extremely wide field of view and the speed that allows it to take lots of big images in a very short time. Combining images reveals subtle details in the clouds of gas and dust. The more images we can combine, the more detail we see!’ This almost 5-gigapixel image combines 678 exposures taken in just 7.2 hours of observing time, and was composed from about two trillion pixels of data in total. No other observatory is capable of producing an image of such a wide area so quickly and with this much depth.’ The Trifid Nebula (also referred to as Messier 20) is a standout in the sky. It’s a bright, colorful cloud of gas and dust about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. What makes it especially striking is the combination of features packed into one place: a glowing pink emission nebula, a cool blue reflection nebula, and dark dust lanes that split it into three sections - hence the name ’Trifid.’ Inside, new stars are forming and blasting out strong winds and radiation, carving up the gas around them. It gives us a dramatic glimpse at how massive stars shape their surroundings even as they’re being born. Below the Trifid Nebula in this image is the Lagoon Nebula (or Messier 8), another vibrant stellar nursery glowing about 4,000 light-years away. You can actually spot the Lagoon with just a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. At its heart is a cluster of young, massive stars - their intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas and shapes the swirling clouds into intricate patterns. The Lagoon nebula provides scientists with a great place to study the earliest stages of star formation - how giant clouds collapse, how star clusters take shape, and how newborn stars start to reshape their environment.’ This expansive image of Trifid and Lagoon together exposes an intricate web of dust lanes and star clusters that make this part of the Milky Way come alive with cosmic activity. The exquisite detail in the structure of the nebulosity shown here? demonstrates the exceptional quality of Rubin’s entire system - from its light-collecting power, to its sensitive camera, to its efficient data transfer and processing system. Over ten years, Rubin Observatory will take millions of images and will image each place in the sky, including this one, about 800 times.’ Every time we look at the Universe in a new way, we discover new things we never could have predicted - and with Rubin we will see more than we ever have before. The image was captured by Rubin Observatory using the 3200-megapixel LSST Camera - the largest digital camera in the world.’ We invite you to zoom in and explore the details in this unique image!
Made from over 1100 images captured by NSF-Doe Vera C. Rubin Observatory, this image contains an immense variety of objects, demonstrating the broad range of science Rubin will transform with its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. The image includes about 10 million galaxies, roughly.05% of the approximately 20 billion galaxies Rubin Observatory will capture over the next decade.
Astronomers have revealed the first images from "the most ambitious astronomical survey to date" - a mission that will transform our understanding of the Universe.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, has released a series of extraordinary images, which show millions of galaxies, stars in the Milky Way and thousands of asteroids, all’in unprecedented detail.
These images, captured in just 10 hours of observations, offer a glimpse of what’s to come from Rubin’s forthcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) - a 10-year mission to build the most detailed time-lapse map of the night sky ever attempted.
The UK is playing a major role in the global collaboration, as the second-largest international contributor to the project, supported by a £23 million investment from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
The UK will host one of three international data facilities to support management and processing of the unprecedented amounts of data that Rubin will produce.
Among the UK scientists closely involved is Professor Chris Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester. Professor Conselice sits on the UK:LSST/Rubin Board and has contributed to key scientific analyses for preparation of the data, including techniques to detect very diffuse light around galaxies and how the data from Rubin can be used with Euclid - another international satellite mission to map the dark universe.
"These images are spectacular and show a few major things. They show how deep and how high resolution the data for the Rubin surveys will be over vast areas of the sky. It also shows that nearly all galaxies have outer diffuse light, which is something we know little about and shows how much is to be discovered. Rubin will allow us to study this light in detail, greatly advancing our understanding of the histories of galaxies, information of which is contained within this light, including merger activity and formation of the first galaxies."
The images have been taken with the LSST Camera - the world’s newest and most powerful survey telescope, equipped with the largest digital camera ever built and feeds a powerful data processing system.
Over the next decade, it will repeatedly scan the sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe that will bring the sky to life with a treasure trove of billions of scientific discoveries. The images will reveal asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, supernova explosions, far-off galaxies and perhaps cosmic phenomena that no one has seen before.
Already, the camera has identified more than 2000 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System.
The project will generate the largest dataset in the history of optical astronomy. The amount of data gathered by Rubin Observatory in its first year alone will be greater than that collected by all’other optical observatories combined.
The dataset is expected to reach around 500 petabytes and catalogue billions of cosmic objects with trillions of measurements that will help scientists make countless discoveries about the Universe and will serve as an incomparable resource for scientific exploration for decades to come.
