This image, from the Vera Rubin Observatory’s “First Look” release, shows prominent galaxy Messier 61, at lower-right, and an impressive stellar stream emanating from it towards the upper-left. This marks the first identification of a novel stellar stream in Rubin data, and may be the ultimate culprit behind the galactic interaction that triggered a recent starburst event inside the main galaxy itself. (Credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA)
Stellar streams are faint trails of stars that appear to “stream” out of galaxies. A new one, escaping galaxy M61, may point to many others.
Back on June 23, 2025, the “first look observations” from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory were released, highlighting the power of the United States’s and the National Science Foundation’s newest telescope. Designed to survey a large portion of the entire sky over and over, more deeply and in a speedier fashion than ever before, its science goals are stupendous. Armed with capabilities that no other observatory can match, it hopes to:
discover enormous numbers of new objects within our Solar System,
look for transient events, or changes in distant stars, galaxies, and nebulae, to greater precision than ever before,
to find new novae, supernovae, tidal disruption events, plus flares and eruptions,
and to measure variable objects in distant galaxies, helping to resolve the Hubble tension,
along with many other endeavors.
However, the greatest thing it can bring to us — like any new observatory with unprecedented capabilities — is something known as discovery…
