This Week in Astronomy: Vera Rubin First Images, The Hunt for Planet Nine and Universe’s First Stars

The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile has released its first dazzling images, showcasing star-forming nebulae and galaxy clusters with unprecedented clarity. Designed to lead the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the observatory will scan the night sky over ten years to explore billions of galaxies, track cosmic events, and detect unknown objects. Named after Vera Rubin, a pioneer in dark matter research, the observatory has already found over 2,000 new asteroids.Meanwhile, scientists may be closing in on the elusive Planet Nine using infrared data from Japan’s AKARI telescope.Separately, radio astronomers are using hydrogen signals to study the universe’s first stars during the "Cosmic Dawn," offering a new way to understand how the first light emerged in the cosmos.Thank you for listening to Bedtime Astronomy — your guide to the cosmos. New episodes on space exploration, NASA missions & the latest astronomy breakthroughs.