Vera Rubin Observatory releases first images from largest camera
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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory on 23 June 2025 released its first images taken with the largest digital camera ever built, a 3,200-megapixel instrument mounted on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at Cerro Pachón, Chile. The images were unveiled at a First Look event in Washington, D.C., hosted by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The observatory's ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time began its science campaign in 2026.
The Camera and Telescope
The camera, about the size of a small car, holds 3,200 megapixels across 189 sensors. It sits on the 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope at an altitude of roughly 2,650 metres. Each exposure covers an area 45 times the size of the full moon, and the survey will scan the southern sky repeatedly, returning to the same patches every few nights for a decade. The project has run for about two decades and cost approximately $810 million, according to the observatory.
Survey Goals and Dark Matter
The observatory is named after Vera Rubin, whose work on galaxy rotation provided the first convincing evidence for dark matter. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time is expected to catalogue roughly 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars, generating 10–20 terabytes of raw data per night. Dark matter is a central target, but the survey also aims to find about 37,000 new trans-Neptunian objects, a tenfold increase on the current tally.
The Search for Planet Nine
The hypothesis of a ninth planet stems from a 2016 paper by Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown of Caltech, who observed that a handful of distant objects beyond Neptune have orbits that cluster together rather than scattering randomly. Rubin is considered one of the best instruments to test whether such a planet exists, as its repeated scans can detect moving or changing objects automatically.
What's Next
The survey's science campaign is now underway and will continue for a decade, with data releases expected periodically. It remains unclear whether the survey will confirm the existence of Planet Nine or resolve the clustering pattern through other explanations.
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Vera Rubin Observatory releases first images from largest camera
