First images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory released, giving a taste of what's to come
A stunning nebula and a sky dotted full of bright stars and dancing galaxies are in the first set of three images released by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
The ground-based telescope, which uses the world's largest digital camera, promises to revolutionise entire fields of astronomy with its wide angle and powerful lens.
The images are a taster of what is expected to be unveiled at 1AM AEST Tuesday morning in a live stream that will also include ultra-high definition video.
According to astronomers, even these first previews are unlike anything they've ever seen before.
Rachel Webster, an astrophysicist at the University of Mebourne, said she was stunned by the vast scale of each picture.
One of Rubin's early pictures is of the Lagoon and Trifid nebulas, two huge regions of interstellar gas some 5,200 and 9,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius.
The image is a composite built from 678 different pictures, captured over a seven-hour period.
Jonti Horner, astrophysicist at the University of Southern Queensland, said the nebulas are one of the "jewels of the night sky" that amateur astronomers often turn their telescopes towards.
Professor Horner said that the detail was "breathtaking".
While other big space telescopes can achieve this level of detail, Professor Webster said they can't do it with the wide angle Rubin enjoys.
"Here, we've got the depth of a big telescope with a very big field of view, and that's very exciting."
Professor Webster said that the colours can tell astronomers about the physical processes happening in the nebulas.
Pink, for instance, indicates a lot of hydrogen.
"There's lots of stars in the pink areas and those are hot young stars," Professor Webster said.
But what sets Rubin's imagery apart is the orange regions around the nebulas. Professor Webster said the orange likely indicates dust — but she's not seen an image like it before.
"This is not surprising, but you don't normally see this large scale."
The other two pictures Rubin has released both look beyond our galaxy to the Virgo Cluster.
This is a group of galaxies 55 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo.
The entire group spans about 8 degrees across the sky, making it too wide for most high-power telescopes to snap in one image.
But, as Swinburne University astrophysicist Tania Barone pointed out, Rubin is designed to see the whole thing in detail.
Part of this important context is the way the galaxies interact with one another, connected by faintly glowing strings of stars.
"Often when you look at images that don't go quite as deep, all the galaxies look isolated," Dr Barone said.
"It's only when you get this really beautiful deep imaging that you see the trails and connections between them and the way that they're merging."
One Rubin image shows three merging galaxies in a corner, with clear connections in between each.
"We're seeing this cosmic dance in motion as they intertwine and merge," Dr Barone said.
While the bright stars with their telltale points and the swirling galaxies might draw the most attention, it's the indistinct, pale smudges that Dr Webster is excited by.
Some of these smudges might be faint Milky Way objects, while others could be unusual galaxies without bright, massive centres.
"For a long time people have speculated on crouching giants, which are amorphous collections of stars that don't have big nuclei in them," Dr Webster said.
There are also features in the images she can't immediately identify — such as a cluster of three galaxies to the left of the image.
"I just look at it and I think: what on Earth is going on there?" Dr Webster said.
"I've never seen a galaxy that looks like that before."
The official unveiling happens at 1am (AEST) this Tuesday, June 24.
If you are keen, you can watch the unveiling live on the telescope's website or rug up and go to a watch party in Melbourne, Sydney or Perth.
The Rubin Observatory, which is run by the US but based in Chile, will take photographs of the night sky every few seconds for the next 10 years.
With its 8.4 metre mirror and 3,000kg camera, the observatory will be able to document the entire night sky every few days.
This means it will be able to spot very subtle changes happening quickly — opening up new fields of research into astrophysics and dark matter.
"We're going to get these really nice, beautiful, clear images of the whole southern sky," Dr Barone said.
But it will also be useful for finding things much closer, like asteroids and Solar System objects.
The observatory is set to start its 10-year survey later this year, but astronomers are expecting exciting results from it straightaway.
"Within the first 12 months, there'll be some super results," Professor Webster said.
They're also not expecting its job to be done after its initial decade.
"If I'm still talking to journalists in 20 years time, we'll still be talking about Vera Rubin," Professor Horner said.
"It'll still be delivering new results, even then."
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