This Tuesday (June 30), scientists with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory announced that the facility's ambitious Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) officially began. Every night for the next 10 years, the observatory's car-size LSST Camera will capture a 3,200-megapixel image of the southern sky — then another, then another, slowly filling in a mosaic of the universe 30 seconds at a time.
Strafing across the sky in stop-motion, the survey is expected to spot between 7 million and 8 million changes among the stars each night — from flashing supernovas and streaking comets to colliding galaxies and dim, tumbling asteroids. Within minutes of each exposure, alerts to any peculiar changes will become publicly available for astronomers and space enthusiasts around the world to study.
Tyson is hoping the firehose of data will unmask theinvisible 95% of the universe that is composed of dark matter and dark energy.
Live Science spoke with Tyson about the LSST and what it may find in the coming years.
Tony Tyson: In a sense, we're making a digital color motion picture of the universe. We'll take thousands of 30-second exposures every night. Within two minutes of the shutter closing on an exposure, we will process all the data, [compare] it from the archival sky of that piece of the sky, and — if something explodes, or pops off, or moves in the sky in a way we don't understand — issue an alert. The alerts go to the world.
BS: Which feed will you be watching most closely?
My hope at this time is that we will discover something unexpected that will revolutionize astronomy. I think it's more than a hope, I think it's a guarantee.
Tony Tyson is an astronomer at the University of California, Davis, and the founding Director of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. (Image credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/G. Watry)TT: I'm a cosmologist, so my hope is that we'll get closer to understanding the physics of dark energy and dark matter.
My hope at this time is that we will discover something unexpected that will revolutionize astronomy.
BS: The Rubin Observatory observes in optical light. Are there any strange optical phenomena you have your eye on?
A small section of the Virgo Cluster revealed in Rubin's debut images. The first images, released in June 2025, capture more than 10 million galaxies. (Image credit: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
BS: What are the Rubin Observatory's main science goals?
Another area is looking at new kinds of stars in our galaxy, so we can look at the history of our galaxy and the history of star formation in our galaxy. At even lower redshift, an interesting area is looking at both comets and potentially Earth-threatening asteroids. Every night we detect about a thousand new asteroids.
BS: Are you talking about companies like Reflect Orbital, which essentially want to put giant mirrors in low Earth orbit? We've written about how satellites like that could totally compromise the LSST.
Reflect Orbital is one example. The other example is these orbiting AI [artificial intelligence] computational centers, which will be exceedingly bright. We've met with all these companies. They say that they feel our pain, but their board of directors or their investors say that they're going to go forward.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory sits on a mountaintop in Chile under famously dark skies. It's view of the universe will be unmatched, if bright corporate satellites don't ruin the view. (Image credit: Hernan Stockebrand)
BS: So if these companies are moving forward, what are you going to do?
I'm inherently an optimist. I think the Reflect Orbital is a failed business model, but they're going to try doing it anyway. So they'll put a lot of junk up there for a while.
Related storiesBS: I truly wish you the best with that. But since you're an optimist, let's end on something positive. You've championed this observatory for more than 20 years — first as its founding director and now its chief scientist. How does it feel now that the LSST is finally operational?
I was the original founding director, I am now the chief scientist, and it is my day job to worry about what's going wrong with this or that. And there's a laundry list of things that we're worried about. But it's working, and it's working quite well. And so that's quite gratifying.
Editor's Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity
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