First images of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The first images are larger and deeper than ever before, showing sections of the Milky Way and the deep universe. Researchers from the Max Planck Society report on their planned research

To the point

  • First images: The first published images show the enormous diversity of objects that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has captured in its images. The images are so large that no single screen is sufficient to display all the details. All images are available for download on the observatory's website.
  • Comprehensive sky survey: The observatory will conduct a ten-year survey of the southern sky, investigating the influence of dark matter and dark energy on the distribution of galaxies in the universe, as well as variable phenomena such as supernovae and the flaring of galaxy cores when they swallow matter.
  • Telescope of records: With an 8.4-metre telescope and the world's largest digital camera, the observatory captures large amounts of data.
  • Participation of Max Planck Researchers: Astronomers from the Max Planck Society hold rights to the observatory's future data and explain their science goals in this article.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory published its first telescope images on 23 June 2025 at 5:30 p.m. Central European Time. The observatory had already shared almost identical image sections in lower resolution via Bluesky early in the morning.

The truly new and special features only become apparent upon closer inspection. At first glance, the images may seem to hardly differ from those taken by other telescopes. However, the full-resolution images demonstrate the true power of the 3,200-megapixel camera. Only a snapshot from the world's largest digital camera can deliver so much pixel information that no single Ultra HD television would be able to display the image in its full size and resolution. If every pixel of a single image from the giant camera were to be reproduced by a pixel on a television, 400 such televisions would be needed to display the entire image in its full size. An image from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is therefore about the size of a basketball court if it were to be filled with Ultra HD TVs.

The true value of the images becomes apparent when you watch the videos on the observatory's website, which zoom in on some of the image details, or when scrolling through the images oneself. Researchers have already made numerous new discoveries in the images, so anyone who loses themselves in the depths of the images at home may find some objects that no human has ever seen before.

A closer look at our Milky Way

The most colourful image shows a section of the sky covering an area approximately 50 times the size of the full moon. This corresponds roughly to the image captured by the LSST camera in a single snapshot. Nevertheless, astronomers made the telescope to gaze at this region for seven hours and superimposed 678 individual images to achieve this magnificent result. This is the only way to clearly see the faint details of the gas and dust that make up the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae. Both nebulae are located in the band of our own spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, and are just over 4,000 light-years away.

A deep look into the universe

This image shows a detailed section of the image at the very top. The latter depicts the entire Virgo galaxy cluster in three trillion pixels. Only a few thousand of the 10 million galaxies in the overall image are bound together by their mutual gravitational pull to form the Virgo cluster. The light from the galaxies in the Virgo cluster travelled for around 55 million years before reaching the telescope.

The zoom-in shown here corresponds to approximately one-fortieth of the field of view that fits into a single camera image, or roughly the area of a full moon. The entire image above covers an area of about 70 full moons in the sky, making it only slightly larger than a single camera image from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. A guided tour accompanies you through the huge image and zooms in on some remarkable details that can be seen in the section shown here.

A telescope of many records

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is a joint project of the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science. At its heart is the 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope, equipped with the largest digital camera ever built, the 3,200-megapixel LSST camera. With each image, the camera captures an area of the sky more than 40 times the size of the full moon. Thanks to the speed of the telescope drive, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will completely image the southern sky every three to four nights. The sky survey – called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – will last ten years and will ultimately image the entire visible sky about 800 times. Researchers expect a data set of around 40 billion celestial objects, including stars in the Milky Way, distant galaxies and even objects in our solar system such as asteroids.

The observatory not only combines high sensitivity with speed, but also features a novel computer infrastructure. Thanks to its enormous computing power, it can process around 20 terabytes of data every night and record up to ten million changes in the objects observed in the sky. "This decade marks a transformative era in astronomy, with an unprecedented surge in data volume and a boom in survey-based science", says Esra Bulbul, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich. “It’s an exciting time not only for observational astronomers but also for theorists, as the increasing precision and scale of data open up new opportunities to uncover previously unknown physics.”

The scientific focus areas coincide with the research interests of several Max Planck Institutes and include, among others, the study of dark matter and dark energy, mapping the Milky Way, and observing short-lived phenomena such as star explosions, asteroids, and the incorporation of stars by supermassive galaxies.

On the trail of dark matter

“The Vera Rubin Telescope will be transformational for my research in cosmology," says Esra Bulbul, astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. "With its wide field of view and depth, it will observe billions of galaxies across vast distances, allowing me to study the large-scale structure of the Universe and its evolution over time.” This is how Esra Bulbul is tracking down the dark components of the universe, which make up about 95 percent of the universe. Data from previous telescopes already show that there must be invisible dark matter that permeates galaxies and galaxy clusters and holds them together. Researchers hope that the data from the Vera C. Rubin Telescope will provide better clues as to how dark matter influences the evolution of galaxies and how dark energy influences the expansion of the universe. There are parallels here with the research of Vera Rubin, after whom the observatory is named. She was one of the first to discover this invisible mass.

Adult galaxies in the kindergarten of the universe

In addition to the large number of galaxies, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will also be able to see them from a great distance. Thanks to the large mirror and the particularly sensitive camera, Eduardo Bañados from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg will be able to study very young galaxies with growing black holes. “These are the galaxies that existed when the universe was just a baby – less than a billion years old.” Since the universe has been expanding in all directions since then, Bañados finds these galaxies mainly at large distances – so far away that their light has taken many billions of years to reach Earth. Researchers are puzzled as to how these young galaxies can already have black holes with considerable mass at their centres. According to current thinking, black holes grow by attracting matter from their surroundings over a long period of time or by merging with other black holes. “The young galaxies shouldn’t have had enough time to grow so massive black holes – even thousand times more massive than the black hole in our own Galaxy, the Milky Way”, says Bañados. “It’s like discovering a full-grown adult in a kindergarten class!” However, long-term observations of such galaxies are still lacking. “The LSST survey is exciting because it will provide us with a cosmic movie. This will allow us to go beyond just discovering such super distant galaxies, but also learning about their physical properties”, says Bañados. The flickering of the bright galaxy core, for example, reveals how the central black holes consume matter. And perhaps this holds the key to the enormous growth spurts that some black holes and their host galaxies must have undergone.

When black holes swallow stars

In addition to mapping stars and galaxies, one of the main objectives of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is to study time-variable phenomena in the sky. The Observatory will not only investigate how active galactic nuclei flicker, but also observe how stars explode, known as supernovae. A special type of explosion is the kilonova, in which two stellar corpses, compact neutron stars, collide and produce heavy elements such as gold. However, only a few kilonovae have been observed so far. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time aims to change that.

Elias Mamuzic from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching near Munich is interested in a very special form of stellar death: tidal disruption events. Here, a star comes so close to a supermassive gravitational trap at the centre of distant galaxies that the immense tidal forces of the black hole tear it apart. The remains of the star gather in a disc around the black hole and feed it for weeks and months. During this process, the centre of the distant galaxy flashes and only returns to its original brightness after months. “It seems as if we have been missing out on a lot of these events so far”, says Elias Mamuzic. "By simply observing the entire sky we will try to catch every event." The fact that the sky survey captures every spot every three to four days also allows the collected data to be used to reconstruct exactly how the tidal disruption event unfolds, in particular how large the disc of gas forming around the black hole actually is.

An icon as namesake

Like all sciences, astronomy was even more male-dominated back then than it is today. Nevertheless, not all the stories of those women without whom the fields of astronomy and space travel would not be where they are today, have been told.

Vera Rubin has long been one of my role models. My students and I are building on her legacy.
 Dr. Esra Bulbul

In a separate article, we tell the story of Vera C. Rubin and how she persevered despite facing substantial external opposition. “Her research fundamentally changed our understanding of the Universe and helped establish dark matter as a cornerstone of modern cosmology”, says Esra Bulbul. “Vera Rubin has long been one of my role models. My students and I are building on her legacy and aiming at finding out the nature of dark matter.”

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