Scientists looked deeper into the cosmos and, while still standing on Earth, managed to capture galaxies scientists have never seen because light has been traveling for billions of years to Earth. NASA’s observation came thanks to one of the most powerful telescopes on the planet. Light is the only reason we can see anything at all. From the simplest object to the most distant galaxy, everything becomes visible only when light reaches us, while some areas remain dark.
We can see because of light, but we can’t see everything
The concept of light-speed is directly tied to how we perceive the world. In our everyday lives, the time it takes for photons to travel from point A to point B is almost imperceptible. In the space vacuum, light travels at nearly 300 million meters per second.
If humans could somehow move at that speed, physics tells us we’d reach unimaginable distances in the cosmos — but we’d never return to the same present moment. Spacetime would stretch behind us, and time as we know it would change.
Luckily, we don’t have to leave Earth to see that far. Telescopes have been helping us peer deeper into space for decades. And now, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), high in Chile’s desert, has done something extraordinary: it recorded the first light — the oldest observable light in the universe.
NASA’s new telescope revealed never seen footage
On August 1, 2014, NASA started the construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), located atop Cerro Pachón in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Ten years later, the telescope—now officially named the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, honoring the scientist whose work confirmed the existence of dark matter.
Its flagship mission, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), is set to span a decade. Over those ten years, the telescope will scan the sky repeatedly, capturing changes and movements across billions of objects. To do this, Rubin is equipped with an enormous 28-foot-wide primary mirror, a secondary mirror measuring 11 feet, and the largest digital camera ever built. Despite weighing roughly 300 tons, the observatory can reposition itself within 30 seconds.
NASA’s Vera Rubin is expected to revolutionize how much data astronomers can collect from Earth. According to The New York Times, the observatory will gather more data in its first year alone than all previous ground-based optical observatories combined. That scale is hard to grasp until you see it in action.
To showcase what it’s capable of, the team behind Rubin recently released its first full-frame images. One of them, a combination of hundreds of smaller exposures, captures two nebulae—the Trifid and the Lagoon—both located more than 4,000 light-years from Earth.
More power to NASA
Another sample image zooms in on the Virgo Cluster, a region densely packed with galaxies. What’s remarkable is that this detailed view represents just a tiny portion—about 2%—of Rubin’s full imaging frame. Researchers Manda Banerji and Phil Wiseman from the University of Southampton explained through The Conversation that what makes Rubin so important isn’t just its size or sensitivity, but the way it brings all of those capabilities together—capturing a wide swath of sky with clarity and speed that have never been matched before.
NASA observatory has room for improvement
Compared to space telescopes like Hubble or the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Rubin holds its own differently. While space-based instruments benefit from being outside Earth’s atmosphere, ground-based observatories like Rubin can be upgraded, maintained, and—crucially—built far larger. One of Rubin’s biggest strengths is its sky coverage. While JWST’s infrared camera captures only about 0.05 square degrees of the sky at a time, Rubin can image 9.6 square degrees in a single exposure—making it significantly faster when it comes to large-scale surveys.