Astronomers have revealed the first images from "the most ambitious astronomical survey to date" - a mission that will transform our understanding of the Universe.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, has released a series of extraordinary images, which show millions of galaxies, stars in the Milky Way and thousands of asteroids, all in unprecedented detail.
These images, captured in just 10 hours of observations, offer a glimpse of what's to come from Rubin's forthcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) - a 10-year mission to build the most detailed time-lapse map of the night sky ever attempted.
The UK is playing a major role in the global collaboration, as the second-largest international contributor to the project, supported by a £23 million investment from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
The UK will host one of three international data facilities to support management and processing of the unprecedented amounts of data that Rubin will produce.
Among the UK scientists closely involved is Professor Chris Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester. Professor Conselice sits on the UK:LSST/Rubin Board and has contributed to key scientific analyses for preparation of the data, including techniques to detect very diffuse light around galaxies and how the data from Rubin can be used with Euclid - another international satellite mission to map the dark universe.
The images have been taken with the LSST Camera - the world's newest and most powerful survey telescope, equipped with the largest digital camera ever built and feeds a powerful data processing system.
Over the next decade, it will repeatedly scan the sky to create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe that will bring the sky to life with a treasure trove of billions of scientific discoveries. The images will reveal asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, supernova explosions, far-off galaxies and perhaps cosmic phenomena that no one has seen before.
Already, the camera has identified more than 2000 never-before-seen asteroids in our Solar System.
The project will generate the largest dataset in the history of optical astronomy. The amount of data gathered by Rubin Observatory in its first year alone will be greater than that collected by all other optical observatories combined.
The dataset is expected to reach around 500 petabytes and catalogue billions of cosmic objects with trillions of measurements that will help scientists make countless discoveries about the Universe and will serve as an incomparable resource for scientific exploration for decades to come.
