Distant nebulae star in one of the first images from the Rubin Observatory

Clouds of gas and dust swirl within star-birthing regions 4,000 light-years away, seen in more detail than ever before. With this view of the Lagoon Nebula and Trifid Nebula, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory makes its public debut.

This image and others unveiled in a livestream June 23 offer just a glimpse of what the observatory will capture over the next 10 years from its perch atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the Chilean Andes.

While panning over an image of the Virgo cluster during the main watch party in Washington, D.C., Rubin Observatory Director Željko Ivezić paused the onscreen video.

“This is an amazing region. We need to stop here. I love it,” he said, with arms raised high and teal nail polish to match the observatory’s color scheme. “Here you can see a stunning variety of celestial objects, from bright stars in our galaxy, ranging in colors from blue to red, to these nearby blue spiral galaxies, to more distant elliptical galaxies that are yellow and red in color.” Those colors help researchers estimate how far the galaxies are from Earth, said Ivezić, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At a June 9 news briefing, astronomer Yusra AlSayyad of Princeton University said that the “Rubin Observatory’s main feature is its opening of the time domain and its enormous field of view.” The first publicly released images showcase those capabilities, said AlSayyad, who oversees image processing at the observatory.

The facility will scan the entire southern sky every three to four nights in an effort called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST. It’ll do that using a self-adjusting telescope with a car-sized digital camera — the largest ever built — that snaps a photo every 30 seconds, resulting in around 1,000 images each night.

“It will enable us to explore galaxies, stars in the Milky Way, objects in the solar system, and all in a truly new way,” Aaron Roodman, an astrophysicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in California who oversees the observatory’s camera, said during the June 9 briefing. “Since we take images of the night sky so quickly and so often, we’ll detect millions of changing objects literally every night.”

Over the next decade, the observatory will also map dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up around 85 percent of the matter in the universe. The facility’s namesake, Vera Rubin, provided the first convincing evidence that the mysterious stuff exists in the 1970s. She died in 2016.

Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, the Rubin Observatory has been under construction for over a decade and should be completed later this year. That’s also when data collection is slated to begin.

The amount of data gathered within the LSST’s first year will be greater than that compiled by all other observatories combined. But that information will also benefit those facilities.

“We are complementary to almost every other astronomical and astrophysics instrument,” Roodman said. In addition to providing data of its own, the new observatory will act as a discovery machine to spot interesting phenomena that can help guide where researchers direct their attention.

“The Rubin Observatory will really, truly change the way the astronomy community will conduct research,” astronomer Sandrine Thomas, the observatory’s telescope project scientist, said at the June 9 briefing. “And in addition, we’ll be able to bring the public along.”