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<\/p>\nOnce the full survey begins this summer, Rubin is expected to produce 7 million alerts and 20 terabytes of data a night.<\/p>\n
For just one example of how this firehose of data is expected to transform our understanding of the cosmos, consider supernovas, the brilliant death throes of exhausted stars.<\/p>\n
Back in the late 1990s, two teams of astronomers used observations of under 100 \u201cType Ia\u201d supernovas to make a revolutionary discovery about our universe: Its expansion is accelerating due to a still-mysterious force called dark energy. Once Rubin is fully up and running, researchers expect to find 250,000 such supernovas in a year.<\/p>\n
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Sarah Greenstreet, an astronomer at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, hopes to use incoming data on millions of asteroids to learn more about the formation of our solar system.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Sarah Greenstreet<\/p>\n
Scientists hope that Rubin\u2019s supernova data can help resolve the Hubble tension<\/a>, the observation that the early universe appears to have expanded faster than the more recent universe. \u201cWe want to collect huge samples of Type Ia supernovae to probe this acceleration in much greater detail,\u201d Smartt said.<\/p>\n Smartt is also interested in finding failed supernovas, which occur when stars collapse in on themselves rather than exploding outward. They might have their origins, paradoxically, in the most massive stars. In February 2026, scientists pinpointed a possible candidate in the Andromeda galaxy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Rubin, with the exquisite detail of its images, is well placed to find these types of events, in which stars disappear in explosions that can be too faint for other surveys to see. \u201cIt goes down 100 times fainter than other sky surveys,\u201d Smartt said.<\/p>\n Visitors From Afar<\/p>\n Rubin can also be used to track interesting and unusual objects passing through our solar system. It\u2019s traditionally been difficult to catch such speedy travelers, at least without a survey that can pick out very faint objects at a rapid pace. Scientists have only ever observed three such interstellar objects \u2014 asteroids and comets that were ejected from other stars and fired into our vicinity \u2014 giving us insight into material from other solar systems. Rubin has already proved its ability to spot them.<\/p>\n Scientists announced the observation of an interstellar comet called 3I\/ATLAS on July 1, 2025. They detected it without Rubin, via a network of four other telescopes that forms the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which usually finds objects formed nearby.<\/p>\n Other astronomers followed up by looking through Rubin\u2019s initial data and discovered that the observatory had also detected 3I\/ATLAS, 10 days earlier<\/a>. If a similar visitor from afar appears in Rubin\u2019s data during the survey, astronomers will receive an alert.<\/p>\n Scientists don\u2019t know exactly how many more interstellar objects<\/a> Rubin will find, but they expect it to find at least some. \u201cIt could be five to 500,\u201d depending on how often these objects are ejected from their home systems, said Rosemary Dorsey<\/a>, an astrophysicist at the University of Helsinki in Finland. \u201cI am optimistic there will be some, but if there aren\u2019t, then that is a really interesting problem.\u201d<\/p>\n Going the Distance<\/p>\n One way that astronomers determine the distance to an object in space is by studying its light. As light makes its way toward Earth while traveling through the expanding universe, it shifts toward the red side of the electromagnetic spectrum. The higher the redshift, the more stretched the light is, and the farther its source is from Earth.<\/p>\n Rubin\u2019s preview data allowed scientists to test how well it could measure this light via a technique called photometric redshift, which will let it map galaxies across the universe to probe dark energy and dark matter. \u201cThe preview data tells us how accurate those photometric redshifts are going to be,\u201d said Kristen Dage<\/a>, an astronomer at Curtin University. Rubin performed at least as well as other cutting-edge telescopes, Dage said, but it will measure the redshift of many more galaxies, about 4 billion of the 20 billion galaxies it will find.<\/p>\n