Millions of stars and galaxies fill a dreamy cosmic landscape in the first-ever images released from a new astronomical observatory with the largest digital camera in the world.
In one composite released Monday, bright pink clouds of gas and dust light up the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, located several thousand light-years away from Earth. In another, a bonanza of stars and galaxies fills the sky, revealing stunning spirals and even a trio of galaxies merging and colliding.
A separate video uncovered a swarm of new asteroids, including 2,104 never-before-seen space rocks in our solar system and seven near-Earth asteroids that pose no danger to the planet.
The images and videos from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory represented just over 10 hours of test observations and were sneak peeks ahead of an event Monday that was livestreamed from Washington, D.C.
Keith Bechtol, an associate professor in the physics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been involved with the Rubin Observatory for nearly a decade, is the project’s system verification and validation scientist, making sure the observatory’s various components are functioning properly.
He said teams were floored when the images streamed in from the camera.
“There were moments in the control room where it was just silence, and all the engineers and all the scientists were just seeing these images, and you could just see more and more details in the stars and the galaxies,” Bechtol told NBC News. “It was one thing to understand at an intellectual level, but then on this emotional level, we realized basically in real time that we were doing something that was really spectacular.”
In one of the newly released images, the Rubin Observatory was able to spot objects in our cosmic neighborhood — asteroids in our solar system and stars in the Milky Way — alongside far more distant galaxies that are billions of light-years away.
“In fact, for most of the objects that you see in these images, we’re seeing light that was emitted before the formation of our solar system,” Bechtol said. “We are seeing light from across billions of years of cosmic history. And many of these galaxies have never been seen before.”
Astronomers have been eagerly anticipating the first images from the new observatory, with experts saying it could help solve some of the universe’s most enduring mysteries and revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos.
“We’re entering a golden age of American science,” Harriet Kung, acting director of the Energy Department’s Office of Science, said in a statement.
“We anticipate that the observatory will give us many insights into our past, our future and possibly the fate of the universe,” Kung said during Monday’s event.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is jointly operated by the Energy Department and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
The facility, named after the American astronomer who discovered evidence of dark matter in the universe, sits atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in central Chile. The observatory is designed to take roughly 1,000 images of the Southern Hemisphere sky each night, covering the entire visible southern sky every three to four nights.
The early images were the result of a series of test observations, but they mark the beginning of an ambitious 10-year mission that will involve scanning the sky every night for a decade to capture every detail and visible change.
“The whole design of the observatory has been built around this capability to point and shoot, point and shoot,” Bechtol said. “Every 40 seconds we’re moving to a new part of the sky. A simple way to think of it is that we’re trying to bring the night sky to life in a way that we haven’t been able to do.”
By repeating that process every night for the next 10 years, scientists will be able to compile enormous images of the entire visible southern sky, allowing them to see stars changing in brightness, asteroids moving across the solar system, supernova explosions and untold other cosmic phenomena.
“Through this remarkable scientific facility, we will explore many cosmic mysteries, including the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the universe,” Brian Stone, chief of staff at the National Science Foundation, said in a statement.
