NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory

The largest spot-the-difference effort EVER has begun!🚨 On the night of Feb 24, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially released its first ~800,000 public alerts of detected changes in the night sky!🔍 A new era of discovery is here✨ 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-ale…

Happy March equinox! ☀️ At NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile, this day marks the beginning of autumn. From here on out, daylight hours in the southern hemisphere will shrink until the June solstice, meaning longer nights and more time to #CaptureTheCosmos 🌌

@SLAClab @NOIRLabAstro @AURADC @NSF @doescience

4️⃣ It produces an enormous amount of data 5️⃣ It's incredibly sensitive 6️⃣ Rubin's First Look on June 23, 2025 showcased its incredible capabilities 7️⃣ It will capture over two million images for the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time

A year ago this month, our 3200-megapixel LSST Camera was installed! Here's what to know about it! 1️⃣ It's enormous! 2️⃣ It sees a huge area of sky at one time 3️⃣ Everything about it is huge, including the images it takes 🧵

Oh, bee-have! 🐝 The Little Beehive Cluster (M41) dazzles above NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory in this @NOIRLabAstro #ImageoftheWeek. 🌌 About 2300 light-years away, M41’s ~100 stars were born together — and Rubin will study clusters like this to reveal how stars form and evolve.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words… Which NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory image are you feeling this Monday?

How many viscachas is too many? Answer: more than we can fit here—because this still isn’t enough! 🐾 These fluffy mountain summit residents have been hopping, sunbathing, and keeping an eye on us while NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory captures the cosmos!

Mapping the Milky Way is like mapping a forest from inside it 🌌 From our spot ~27,000 light-years from the center, the big picture is hard to see. NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory will detect and measure ~17B stars, creating a Milky Way map ~100× larger than we've had before.

📢 LSST Discovery Alliance is accepting applications for the 2026 Data Science Fellowship! This program teaches skills needed to work with the massive datasets from NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's 10-year survey. Learn more & apply by March 27: lsstdiscoveryalliance.org/lsst-discovery…

📷: NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA. Alert images and classification provided by ALeRCE.

This particular star had not been seen to change in brightness before — it's a new transient! Once Rubin begins its relentless ten-year survey of the southern sky, it will continue to monitor this object (and billions of others!) for flickers, pulses, flares, and motion.

NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory has been sending public alerts for two weeks, so let's rewind to night one. Meet the first newly changing source reported by Rubin!🐣 This alert flagged something that hadn't been seen changing before. We call it 170054916194172951. Catchy, right?

🚨🔭 First Rubin alerts… followed up by @NOIRLabastro! For the first time, NSF NOIRLab has successfully demonstrated its end-to-end system for rapid follow-up observations triggered by alerts from the NSF–DOE @VRubinObs. Read more: noirlab.edu/public/es/news…

@KIPAC1 🥳🥳

We kicked off our 2026 Rubin Series with a talk at College of San Mateo. One of our grad students, Theo Schutt brought the universe to 70+ people with stunning First Look images from @VRubinObs. Stay tuned for our next stop at De Anza College on April 23! kipac.stanford.edu/news/kipacs-ru…

@SLAClab 🤩🤩

This is @VRubinObs. Rubin will scan the entire night sky for 10 years, generating up to 10 terabytes of data per night. The resulting Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will create the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the universe in history.

A sky stacked with showstoppers ✨🌌 NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory sits beneath the glowing band of the Milky Way. Near the horizon: the Southern Cross. Off to the side: the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf galaxy visible from dark skies like Cerro Pachón in Chile. 🌟

NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory will send millions of alerts every night...who sorts through them all? Meet the alert brokers. These software systems ingest, classify, & add context to Rubin’s alerts so scientists can focus on what they're interested in. 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/for-scientists…

Over the first year of the survey, Rubin will ramp up to a whopping ~7 million alerts every night 💥 The Universe is a hive of activity, and soon we'll get to see it in action like never before 🌌

And this is just the start! Once Rubin begins its ten-year survey, it will start to build up coverage of the entire visible sky — because in order to know that something changed, we first need to know what "normal" looks like.

Alerts from NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory have been flowing for about a week...how many have there been?? 🚨 So far, Rubin has generated....drumroll please🥁 ~1.7 million world-public alerts! That's ~1.7 MILLION objects that changed in brightness or position in just seven nights🤯