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At the heart of Chile’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the largest camera human beings have ever built. Around the size of a small car, this behemoth weighs more than three tons, and the images it captures are even more impressive—to display the 3,200-megapixel pictures in their full glory would take hundreds of ultra high-definition screens.
Since it came online in 2024, the Rubin Observatory has been using this extraordinary camera to survey the southern sky as part of its 10-year mission to create a time-lapse record (dubbed the Legacy Survey of Space and Time). Now it’s taken a series of photographs of a region of the night sky known as the Cosmic Evolution Survey Deep Field (COSMOS field), capturing over 650,000 galaxies and more than 75,000 stars.
This exceptionally galaxy-rich region was first photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003. Since then, the COSMOS field has been investigated by telescopes around the world capable of viewing the area in wavelengths that stretch beyond the visible spectrum in both directions.
The are two reasons the Rubin Observatory is turning its attention to the well-studied COSMOS now. First of all, the large number of prior observations makes the region a good reference target to compare measurements from the relatively new telescope. In fact, the image was released as part of an early preview of Rubin’s data. Secondly, Rubin is going to be studying this region extensively during its 10-year mission to contribute a little texture to those other observations, most notably adding the dimension of time.
Read more: “Creating a Cosmic Movie”
“The COSMOS deep image is just the beginning for Rubin in this region,” Rubin Observatory director Bob Blum said in a statement. “Repeated visits to the field over the next few years will demonstrate the power of our survey design for discovery by providing our science community with a huge number of transient and variable objects like supernovae and other explosive transients for follow-up and detailed study.”
In the meantime, it’s certainly off to quite an auspicious start.
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Lead image: Rubin Observatory / YouTube
