In June 2025, on a Chilean mountaintop, scientists switched on the largest digital camera ever built — named for the astronomer who found the first convincing evidence for dark matter — at the start o

Key Points:

• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory unveiled its first images on 23 June 2025, using a massive 3,200-megapixel camera mounted on the 8.4-metre Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile, aiming to conduct a ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time starting in 2026.
• The observatory's survey plans to repeatedly scan the southern sky, cataloging approximately 20 billion galaxies and 17 billion stars, while generating 10-20 terabytes of data nightly, with a key goal of discovering around 37,000 new trans-Neptunian objects.
• The search for a hypothetical ninth planet, proposed in 2016 based on unusual clustering of distant objects' orbits, is a major focus; Rubin's deep, wide-field observations may detect this planet if it exists and is sufficiently bright and close.
• Even if the ninth planet is not directly observed, the large dataset of outer solar system objects will improve statistical analyses of orbital clustering, potentially supporting or challenging the Planet Nine hypothesis.
• Challenges include interference from increasing numbers of low Earth orbit satellites, which leave streaks in images, but the observatory has strategies to manage this; the next few years will focus on building the catalog of distant objects regardless of a planet discovery.