Vera Rubin Observatory Begins Capturing the Greatest Cosmic Movie Ever Made
The 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), in which the University of Nova Gorica is also participating, has officially started, marking the beginning of a new era in astronomy and cosmology
On Tuesday, 30th June 2026, from a mountaintop in Chile, under clear dark skies, Vera Rubin Observatory has begun the revolutionary Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
Over the next ten years, Vera Rubin Observatory will create the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the Universe in history. It will relentlessly observe the entire southern sky every few nights to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe. This long-awaited milestone is the culmination of years of effort by thousands of people around the world.
This American-Chilean project involves experts from as many as 27 other countries, including Slovenia. The University of Nova Gorica is the only university in Slovenia with direct access to the data, as researchers from the Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology (CAC) of the University of Nova Gorica (UNG) have been participating in this project since 2016.
Prof. Andreja Gomboc, head of the CAC UNG collaboration with Vera Rubin Observatory, comments on this important milestone: "For our Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Nova Gorica, this is wonderful news that we have been eagerly awaiting. We have been involved in the LSST project for ten years and therefore have access to all data on billions of stars and galaxies, and trillions of changes in the night sky that will be detected during its ten-year sky survey. Within this wealth of data, our group will be searching primarily for events where a star passes too close to a black hole and is torn apart by it." She adds: "We are on the threshold of great changes in astrophysics, both in terms of the enormous amount of data and in the way it is analysed, where artificial intelligence methods are indispensable." Prof. Gomboc is also a supervisor in the European projects TALES and COFUND SMASH, coordinated by the University of Nova Gorica, in which doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers are refining machine learning methods and applying them, among other things, to the analysis of data from the Vera Rubin Observatory.
Dr. Tanja Petrushevska, a researcher at CAC UNG, highlights the new scientific research opportunities enabled by the observatory: "LSST will transform how we hunt for strongly lensed supernovae, rare cosmic events that let us probe the expansion of the universe in new ways. For our research group at UNG, the launch of the LSST project opens the door to discoveries that simply weren't possible before.”
Eduardo Concepción, young researcher at CAC UNG, highlights the exciting opportunity for collaboration that LSST will provide to the astronomical community: “The number of transients that we will find in LSST data will be so large that it will require us to be in touch with many other groups all over the world, to make sure we are working efficiently and in synergy. That is a huge challenge, but also a great opportunity.”
Vera Rubin Observatory’s unique design combines enormous light-collecting power, the ability to move rapidly across the sky, and a wide field of view, as large as 40 full Moons. The observatory contains the largest digital camera in the world that, capturing a new, detailed image of a portion of the sky approximately every 40 seconds. Operating with this speed and sensitivity, Vera Rubin Observatory is capable of catching faint objects and fleeting events with remarkable reliability and consistency every night.
Vera Rubin Observatory is bringing the Universe to life, illuminating a treasure trove of discoveries: pulsating stars, supernova explosions, the fossil record of galaxies, clues to the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, and entirely new phenomena we’ve never seen before. Some cosmic processes unfold slowly, unpredictably, or incredibly rarely, which is why a ten-year survey is essential. By returning to each point in the sky about 800 times over a decade, Rubin data is providing the scientific community with deep, time-rich views needed to uncover subtle events, capture moving objects, and study the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
Not only is Vera Rubin Observatory helping to unlock the mysteries of the distant Universe, it is also the most powerful Solar System discovery machine ever built. By taking about a thousand images every night, it is compiling an astonishingly detailed census of our Solar System, including millions of asteroids and comets. In just a month and a half, during early optimization surveys, it discovered over 11,000 never-before-seen asteroids, including 33 near-Earth objects and 380 trans-Neptunian objects.
Vera Rubin Observatory will also advance opportunities for multi-messenger astronomy, which is the study of cosmic events using multiple signals such as light, gravitational waves, and cosmic rays. The observatory’s rapid observations of transients such as stellar explosions, actively feeding black holes, and collisions between compact objects will guide telescopes around the world to follow up on these fleeting events.
Each night, Vera Rubin Observatory is collecting approximately ten terabytes of data and producing as many as seven million alerts of changes in the night sky. These alerts stream to alert brokers — automated systems that sort and classify these changes so scientists can act quickly.
When the LSST project is complete, the final dataset will contain billions of objects with trillions of measurements. The University of Nova Gorica is proud to be part of such a groundbreaking and unique project for world astronomy and cosmology.
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Vera Rubin Observatory Press release
