Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins its Legacy Survey of Space and Time
The 10-year census will scan the entire southern sky every few nights, generating millions of alerts each night and an unprecedented stream of astronomical data.
This 1.7-gigapixel view of the constellation Lupus was captured by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The image showcases the telescope’s unmatched range, resolving individual stars and faint dust within our own Milky Way, as well as countless distant background galaxies. Credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA
The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially launched the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a 10-year census of the southern sky that astronomers have anticipated for decades.
The announcement came June 30, capping a months-long commissioning process that followed the facility’s handover from construction to operations last October. “It is amazing and humbling to be here at this time and place as we start the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, after more than two decades of incredible work by our dedicated team,” said Bob Blum, director of Rubin Observatory at NSF NOIRLab, in a press release.
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Unprecedented data volume
Perched atop Cerro Pachón in Chile, Rubin’s 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope is now sweeping the sky with the world’s largest camera — a 3,200-megapixel monster that produces a new image roughly every 40 seconds. Over the next decade, the observatory will revisit every corner of the southern sky about 800 times, collecting around 10 terabytes of data each night as well as generating up to 7 million automated alerts per night— flags for anything in the sky that has moved, brightened, dimmed, or otherwise changed.
The scientific scope is vast: unlocking dark matter and dark energy, real-time detection of stellar explosions, gravitational-wave follow-up, and more. Rubin is also the most capable solar system survey machine ever put into service. In just its first six weeks of early operations, the telescope cataloged more than 11,000 previously unknown asteroids — among them 33 near-Earth objects whose orbits come close to our own planet’s, and 380 trans-Neptunian objects orbiting beyond Neptune.
Unexpected discoveries await
But that was just the beginning. The real discoveries are yet to come, and no one knows for sure what LSST will uncover. “Because there hasn’t been a time-domain survey at this scale, I think we’re going to find all kinds of unexpected things that we just can’t even imagine right now,” NOIRLab community scientist Jeff Carlin tells Astronomy. “To me, that’s the most exciting thing to look forward to.”
When it’s complete after a decade of nightly observations, the LSST dataset will contain trillions of measurements of billions of objects — all publicly accessible.
