Vera C. Rubin Observatory launches decade‑long sky survey

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun its ten‑year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Mounted on Cerro Pachón, the facility houses the world’s largest digital camera – about the size of a small car, weighing roughly 3 tonnes, and equipped with a 3 200‑megapixel sensor. The camera will capture 700‑800 images of the southern sky each night, producing a detailed, time‑resolved map of the universe.

The survey aims to catalog billions of objects, detect millions of asteroids (including dozens of near‑Earth objects already identified during commissioning), search for the hypothetical Planet Nine, and probe fundamental questions about dark matter, dark energy, supernovae and black holes. All data will be released to the global scientific community and the public, enabling astronomers worldwide to study transient events and the structure of the cosmos.