The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for producing unprecedented views of the universe using a powerful camera—with its immense field of view—and combining it with depth and speed to detect extremely faint objects. The question Can an observatory create a comprehensive survey of the night skies consistently over 10 years, enabling previously impossible discoveries related to dark matter, dark energy, supernovae, and near-Earth asteroids? The results Nearly two decades in the making, the Rubin Observatory released the first images captured by its 3,200-megapixel camera to the public on June 23—and they did not disappoint. “We were a little surprised that it worked so well, so fast,” Bob Blum, Rubin’s director for operations, told Gizmodo. “Even though you know what’s coming and you have confidence in the team that it’ll turn out well and you’ll do what you said you were going to do, to see it happen is just amazing.” The telescope, perched atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, is equipped with the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy and an ultra-sensitive 28-foot (8.4-meter) primary mirror. Although it’s not yet fully operational, Rubin used its car-sized camera to conduct 10 hours of test observations. During that time, the observatory captured millions of galaxies and stars scattered across the Milky Way, in addition to 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids. Rubin’s first released composite image, titled “The Cosmic Treasure Chest,” was compiled from 1,185 individual exposures. The most notable aspect of the image is that instead of the usual dark void between objects, the entire field of view is brimming with details thanks to the observatory’s ultra-sensitivity. For Aaron Roodman, the LSST camera program lead, he was just glad it worked. “I didn’t really care that they looked great, just the fact that everything worked,” Roodman told Gizmodo. “The key idea is that we want to get images of the whole sky,” Roodman added. “We want to do it as fast as possible, with as much sensitivity to light as possible. So that really drove the design… One of the key elements was to have every image cover a big swath of the sky.” With its unique three-mirror design, which includes the largest convex mirror ever built, Rubin will observe the cosmos on an automated schedule. Each 30-second exposure will cover an area around 45 times the size of the full Moon. Then, the LSST camera will capture wide-field images and stitch them together to create a complete view of the southern sky every three nights. The team behind Rubin opened the observatory’s dome and began collecting data last fall. “The first photons ever collected by the system were actually very close to focus,” Blum said. “Just pointing at the sky that very first time and snapping an image, it was almost in focus. And within three images, we got a nicely focused image.” The observatory will continue its commissioning phase until October before it officially becomes fully operational. From that point on, Rubin will observe the cosmos every night for the next 10 years, capturing around 800 deep exposure images of every part of the visible sky. A lot still needs to fall into place over the next few weeks for that to happen. “There’s a difference between showing the world a great image and then being able to reliably do it every single night,” Blum said. By gathering a decade’s worth of observations, Rubin will produce a high-definition, ultra-wide time lapse of the surrounding universe. Why they did it The observatory was first conceptualized in the 1990s as sketches on a napkin. “Twenty years ago, it was a good idea,” Željko Ivezić, director of Rubin construction, told Gizmodo. “It started with a few dozen people who got excited about the prospect of building the greatest astronomical discovery machine in history.” During that time, researchers were making big advances in understanding dark matter and its place in the broader cosmological model. Rubin was first known as the dark matter telescope, with researchers hoping to learn more about the invisible glue that holds the universe together by observing many galaxies at a large scale. “In the early 90s, people realized that they could obtain observations of many galaxies and, in a statistical sense, understand what dark matter would do to the shapes of galaxies as observed in the sky,” Blum said. The telescope, overseen by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), was prioritized in the 2010 Decadal Survey, a report released every 10 years to highlight priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade. In 2015, construction on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope began in Chile. Its name would later change to commemorate astronomer Vera Rubin, whose seminal work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter in the 1970s. The idea for the telescope later evolved to include the search for transients—objects that change in brightness—such as variable stars in the Milky Way, objects in the solar system, and supernovae, as well as to observe the overall evolution of our galaxy. Rubin was also intended to detect very faint objects and catalog 90% of near-Earth asteroids. “Something that most of us are excited about is that Rubin, because of its wide field and ability to take images over time, will explore a parameter of space that allows us to look for different things, and maybe rare things that we have never seen before,” Blum explained. “There’s certainly a hope, and maybe even an expectation, that we’ll find new things in there.” Why they’re a winner Although astronomers first conceived the idea for Rubin decades ago, it remains a groundbreaking observatory poised to deliver unmatched views of the cosmos. “How do you stay at the top for two decades?” Ivezić said. “When we designed the system, we already assumed there would be rapid development of computer technology and of our ability to process data. The reason why we are still at the cutting edge is that the whole system was designed, in particular its software, [so] that it can update as computers progress.” Rubin’s unique combination of capabilities will provide scientists worldwide with a treasure trove of data. The observatory is equipped with a computer algorithm that will decide on a series of positions in the sky every night and automatically alert scientists to items of interest. Scientists can choose their targets, whether it be supernovae or asteroids, and set constraints on what should trigger an alert. “The idea is that if we discover something new, and we will discover up to 10 million new things per night, we will not be chasing them, because we are not designed for chasing individual things,” Ivezić said. “We will be just doing our steady, boring thing, but other people who have specialized telescopes that can do different kinds of data, like spectroscopy for example, can filter that stream.” The Rubin Science Platform is an online service that allows scientists to access and analyze data collected by the telescope, creating thousands of opportunities for new discoveries. “There will be a lot of excitement outside of the observatory, not inside our building,” Ivezić added. “Around the world, people will be chasing these new transients, new objects, and obtaining some additional data, additional analysis, and there will be thousands, literally thousands of scientists, connecting to our database.” What’s next Rubin has been in its commissioning phase since April. That involves running the camera and the telescope, capturing images, analyzing them, and fine-tuning the system to improve its performance. “It’s a one of a kind scientific instrument,” Roodman said. “You don’t just flip the switch and everything works perfectly. It doesn’t happen that way, it’s too complicated.” It’s currently winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the weather has not always cooperated. “Twenty-five years of development, all leading to these few months where we’re on sky trying to finish the commissioning,” Blum said. “All the different random things that happened to our schedule put us in this position at this time in the winter, and so we’ve had some snowstorms and other things going on that have made it challenging.” The commissioning phase will continue until at least October, and the team is looking for a few more things to check off the list before operations begin. The Rubin telescope will enter full operations once the system has met a set of requirements. “We’ve tested everything that we could in advance, and that gets us to the point where things will operate at all, but to really get things to work at their peak, that takes time,” Roodman said. Once Rubin has entered its full operational capacity, Ivezić anticipates that things will be fairly boring at the observatory. “Once the Sun is down and it’s dark, we say, ‘go,’ and if everything is working properly, you have nothing to do until the morning,” he said. “On average, maybe just two people will be spending the night at the observatory, their job will be relatively boring. They will be sitting there making sure everything goes well, maybe reading a book or looking at Tiktok videos.” The team Team members included Tony Tyson, project scientist; Steve Kahn, director of the LSST project; Victor Krabbendam, project manager for LSST; Bob Blum, director of operations; Željko Ivezić, project scientist and director of construction; Sandrine Thomas, deputy director of construction, associate director of Rubin Observatory for Rubin Summit Operations; Aaron Roodman, deputy director of construction, LSST program lead; Phil Marshall, deputy director of operations. And many, many more. Click here to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.