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.”
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