Rubin's Ocean of Stars

Dive in and explore this image peering through our home galaxy, the Milky Way. At first glance, it’s a dense scatter of light, like a glittering sea. Look closer, and the stars begin to stand out individually — notice their range of colors and brightnesses. Rubin captures stars in clear detail, revealing faint light in crowded stellar regions. This view is close to the Milky Way’s plane, the crowded disk of the galaxy.

In this image, millions of multi-colored stars appear against a backdrop of galaxies of all shapes and sizes. The brightest stars punctuate the scene in dazzling blue, yellow, red, and white. Look very closely, and you may spot a few ghostly clouds of Galactic gas and dust muting the distant light.

We’re familiar with stars as points of light in the night sky, but they have even more to offer when we take a closer look. Stars are some of the building blocks of a galaxy, and they carry information about the galaxy’s past. Their colors and brightness tell us about their temperature, size, and age: bluer stars are usually hotter, more massive, and younger, while redder stars tend to be cooler, less massive, and older. By studying stars across the Milky Way, scientists can piece together when different parts of our galaxy formed and how it has evolved over time.

Although this image is static, it represents a much more active Universe. Many of these stars change in brightness or shift slightly in position over time. Over Rubin’s 10-year survey, scientists will watch this scene come to life, tracking changes that occur on timescales from days to years.

Using six different filters to observe the sky in multiple wavelengths, Rubin Observatory will ultimately measure around 17 billion stars, helping us build a much clearer picture of the Milky Way’s structure and history.

To learn more about this image, take our Skyviewer tour: Ocean of Stars: Get Oriented