One of the standout photos is a composite of 678 exposures taken over seven hours, showing the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas in vivid pinks and oranges. These nebulae lie several thousand light-years from Earth.
This image provided by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory shows 678 separate images taken by the observatory in just over seven hours of observing time. Combining many images in this way clearly reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that comprise the Trifid nebula (top right) and the Lagoon nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth. (NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
Also captured were two bright blue spiral galaxies from the Virgo Cluster, a dense group of galaxies in space.
Built to study the night sky in detail, Rubin Observatory will survey the southern sky every night for the next 10 years. It will create an ultra-wide, high-definition, time-lapse record of the universe, capturing changes and movement across space. Its primary mission, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, will begin in 2025.
The observatory’s 8.4-meter telescope feeds data into a high-speed processing system. During just 10 hours of test runs, it already recorded millions of stars and galaxies and thousands of asteroids.
In its full operation, Rubin will take around 1,000 images of the Southern Hemisphere sky each night, scanning the full visible sky every 3–4 nights.
It is expected to image 20 billion galaxies and discover millions of asteroids, comets, and interstellar objects, greatly advancing planetary defense and space research.
Rubin is named after American astronomer Vera C. Rubin, whose work first pointed to the presence of dark matter—a mysterious, invisible substance that makes up much of the universe.
The observatory also aims to investigate dark energy, a force believed to cause the universe’s expansion to accelerate. Together, dark matter and dark energy are thought to make up 95% of the universe, yet remain poorly understood.
(Edited by : Vivek Dubey)
