New Vera Rubin Observatory discovers 2,000 unknown asteroids within 10 hours
There are dozens of telescopes on Earth and satellites in the sky searching for new objects that might pose a threat to our planet. The National Science Foundation-Department of Energy's Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile was not built to be an all-in-one asteroid detector.
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Still, as a fast-moving, machine-learning facility, the observatory is the most effective at spotting interstellar objects passing through the solar system, according to the NSF.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory took two decades to complete and was named after the American astronomer credited with the first evidence of dark matter.
Later this year, work will begin creating the largest astronomical movie yet of the Southern Hemisphere, known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, using a camera of the same name.
The LSST Camera is the largest digital camera in the world with a field of view of about 45 times the area of the full Moon in the night sky. One image would need 400 Ultra HD TV screens to display.
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5 The first images by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory revealed 2,000 undiscovered asteroids taken in just 10 hours.
5 This image provided by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory shows 678 separate images taken by the observatory in just over seven hours of observing time.
AP
On Monday, the Rubin team revealed the first images taken by the observatory, including parts of the Milk Way and beautiful spiral galaxies. Among the first images were more than 2,000 asteroids, including seven near-Earth asteroids previously undocumented in NASA's Small-Body Database.
A timelapse video shows how the Observatory's powerful camera tracked the moving dots in the sky. On night one, nearly 1,000 asteroids were found.
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5 Authorities and scientists attend a simultaneous conference with the United States, after the first images of deep space captured by the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile were revealed, in Santiago on June 23, 2025.
AFP via Getty Images
5 A drone view of NSFâDOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory during the First Look observing campaign.
RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/T. Matsopoulos
5 This image provided by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory shows a small section of the observatory's total view of the Virgo cluster.
AP
By the end of a week of observations lasting a few hours each night, the observatory had found more than 2,100 never-before-seen in our solar system in just a fraction of the night sky it will eventually scan.
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These new asteroids, including seven near-Earth asteroids, pose no danger to our planet.
According to the NSF, Rubin will discover millions of new asteroids within the first two years of observations.
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The Rubin Observatory found 2,104 asteroids in just a few days. It could soon find millions more.
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. It was weirdly emotional on Monday, June 23, as several grainy white specks streaked across my computer screen while ambient rhythms buzzed in the background. Those specks were part of a film that played during the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's highly anticipated first image release conference — and they each represented an asteroid that had just been discovered. It felt like witnessing something hugely profound, and there are two reasons why. First of all, to put it simply, with just a few nights of data, the Rubin Observatory team was able to identify 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system — seven of which are categorized as near-Earth objects. (No, none are expected to strike our planet. Don't worry). For context, there are approximately a million known asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood; over the next few years, Rubin could very well hike that figure up to five million. "This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid," Željko Ivezić, Deputy Director of Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during the conference. "We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years." This is astonishing in itself — talk about an exemplary first impression — but there's still that second thing that makes Rubin's new asteroid data incredible. They can be formatted as movies. For some context about Rubin, this observatory is our brilliant new ground-based eye on the universe, and is located at the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón in Chile. It has the ability to image giant swaths of the sky using the world's largest digital camera — and when I say giant, I mean giant. Related: 6 incredible objects hidden in Vera C. Rubin Observatory's mind-boggling first image One of its first presented images, for instance, features a bunch of glowing, hazy galaxies of all shapes and sizes. It's difficult not to daydream when looking at a couple of lovely lavender spirals that represent realms comparable to our entire Milky Way. But what you see below in this image is only 2% of the full Rubin view: The plan is for Rubin to capture such massive, high-resolution images of the southern sky once every three nights for at least the next 10 years. You can therefore consider it to be a super-fast, super-efficient and super-thorough cosmic imager. Indeed, those qualities are perfect for spotting some of the smallest details trailing through the space around our planet: asteroids. "We make movies of the night sky to see two things: objects that move and objects that change brightness," Ivezić said. "Objects that move come in two flavors. Stars in our galaxy move, and they move slowly. Much faster objects are asteroids." Zooming into a tiny portion of one of Rubin's images, Ivezić pointed out that there are actually invisible photobombers present. He was talking about the asteroid streaks Rubin's software so kindly removed from the main attraction (I mean, look at that spiral). However, the fact that those asteroids can be removed from an image means they can be precisely isolated to begin with, making it possible to really focus on them if you want to — something that isn't always possible with zippy, fleeting space objects. In fact, it's tremendously difficult to record an asteroid at all. "Asteroids, they disappear after you get one picture of them," Ivezić said, calling Rubin's ability to image small objects orbiting the sun "unprecedented." In the Rubin image Ivezić called out to showcase the observatory's asteroid-tracking capabilities, the asteroid streaks are seen in different colors. This is because each corresponds to one exposure used to create the final image. You can think of it as different images stitched together to create a final view of the asteroids' trajectories. And to take things a step further, if you slap a few of these datasets together, you can indicate asteroid motion against the more static background of stars and galaxies — like a movie. This feature of Rubin should be huge not only because it'd allow scientists to better study asteroid movements and discover new near-Earth objects, but also for humanity's efforts in planetary defense. Over the last couple of years, scientists have really started to question how we can protect our planet if an asteroid were headed our way. NASA's wildly successful DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission — which sent a spacecraft on a death mission to crash into an asteroid and see if the object's trajectory can be changed — was arguably the feat that brought planetary defense to the public eye. It'd also be remiss not to mention all the recent anxiety surrounding Asteroid 2024 YR4, which was potent enough to even penetrate the jokes of a random comedy show in New York City I went to around the time it was making headlines. 2024 YR4 briefly had a head-turning likelihood of hitting our planet before that likelihood shot down to nil. RELATED STORIES —'City killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 could shower Earth with 'bullet-like' meteors if it hits the moon in 2032 —US Representatives worry Trump's NASA budget plan will make it harder to track dangerous asteroids —NASA's Lucy spacecraft snaps first close-ups of weird peanut-shaped asteroid There was even a hearing about asteroid safety in May, held by the U.S. House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, during which U.S. Representatives expressed their concern that asteroid defense may be impacted by President Trump's major science funding cuts. All of this is to say that I imagine a state-of-the-art asteroid detector is very welcome in the scientific community right now. To really illustrate the ultimate promise of Rubin's asteroid adventures, Ivezić brought up a simulation of all asteroids expected to orbit our sun. "This blue donut is a simulation of all asteroids we expect there," he said. "All of these new discoveries are found in this one narrow slice of this big donut. In two or three years, after we start LSST later this year, we will sweep around and discover all of the millions of asteroids." This article was originally published on
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Rubin Observatory Data Flood Will Let the Universe Alert Astronomers 10 Million Times a Night
Bang! Whiz! Pop! The universe is a happening place—full of exploding stars, erupting black holes, zipping asteroids, and much more. And astronomers have a brand-new, superpowerful eye with which to see the changing cosmos: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. The Rubin Observatory released its first images last week, and they're stunning—vast, glittering star fields that show off the telescope's massive field of view and spectacularly deep vision. But two of the endeavor's most compelling aspects are difficult to convey in any individual image, no matter how spectacular: the sheer amount of data Rubin will produce and the speed with which those data will flood into astronomers' work. 'We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears,' says Yusra AlSayyad, an astronomer at Princeton University and Rubin's deputy associate director for data management. Any time something happens in Rubin's expansive view, the observatory will automatically alert scientists who may be interested in taking a closer look. The experience will be like receiving personalized notifications from the universe. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] That sounds straightforward enough—until you hear the numbers. 'We're expecting approximately 10,000 alerts per image and 10 million alerts per night,' AlSayyad continues. 'It's way too much for one person to manually sift through and filter and monitor themselves.' AlSayyad compares Rubin's data stream to a dashcam or a video doorbell that constantly films everything in its view. 'You can't just sit there and watch it,' she says. 'In order to make use of that video feed, you need data management.' For Rubin, that means building a static image of the sky—a background template, so to speak—against which any changes will be easy to spot. The telescope will construct this static view within the first year or so of regular operations. Once the background image for a particular section of the sky is ready, the real flood will begin. As the telescope snaps its gigantic photographs, algorithms will first automatically correct for effects such as stray light from the sky and image-blurring atmospheric turbulence. Then the algorithms will compare those tweaked images with the static template, marking every little difference—an expected 10,000 in each snapshot. There will be approximately 1,000 images per night, night after night, for as long as Rubin remains in operations. Astronomers love data, but no one has that kind of time in a day. So each individual scientist (amateurs can sign up, too) must first enroll with the Rubin Observatory's so-called alert brokers. Users can request alerts about supernovae or asteroids, for example, then set constraints on just how interesting an event should be to trigger a notification. Such limitations are important because, again, fielding 10 million alerts per night is an untenable prospect for anyone. 'It really is a kind of overwhelming scale of data,' says Eric Bellm, an astronomer at the University of Washington and Rubin's alert production science lead. And that flood will continue for 10 years straight as the Rubin Observatory executes its signature project, dubbed the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). During this period, the telescope will zip its view across the sky in a carefully choreographed dance that will ultimately produce the best high-definition movie of the heavens that humanity has ever conceived. Rubin's scientists have already sketched the basic survey, says Federica Bianco, an astronomer and data scientist at the University of Delaware and deputy project scientist at the Rubin Observatory. But many details will be worked out along the way, which will let them program the telescope to adapt to the astronomical community's interests, as well as any sudden celestial surprises. 'Ten years ago we were not really seriously thinking of gravitational-wave counterparts, which is all the rage today,' Bianco says. (These counterparts are the light-emitting sources of gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime that scientists first measured in September 2015 using the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors.) 'We truly believe that LSST itself will discover new things, will transform the way in which we think about the universe,' she adds. That means making the observatory responsive to the cosmos. 'If that is true, then we need to enable changes that allow us to capture these new physics, these new phenomena.' For some science, the discoveries will be limited by whatever the sky is gracious enough to give—a star must explode for the Rubin Observatory to spot a new supernova, for example. But a particularly intriguing case comes from planetary science within our own solar system. For centuries, astronomers have snagged observations of asteroids and comets—respectively, rocky and icy objects that swarm between and around the planets as all orbit the sun. All that effort has put more than 1.3 million asteroids in our catalogs, but astronomers expect Rubin to identify perhaps three times that many new objects—practically without trying. When the LSST survey is running at full capacity, alerts for potential newfound asteroids will be sent straight to an international group called the Minor Planet Center, which tends a database of all such space rocks. 'We just sort of sit back and these objects will be discovered and reported to us,' says Meg Schwamb, an astronomer at Queen's University Belfast. Schwamb co-chairs the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration and has worked to estimate what the telescope will find in our cosmic neighborhood. And because these space rocks are already out there, rattling through the solar system, Rubin will rack up discoveries quickly, Schwamb and her colleagues predict—with some 70 percent of new objects discovered during the survey's first two years. 'That, I think, is mind-blowing. That really allows us to start being able to watch these objects,' Schwamb says. 'There's instant gratification.' Not everything Rubin will study is so speedy and unsubtle; the observatory will also be an astonishingly powerful tool for probing the enigmatic dark matter that produces no light yet holds galaxies together and outweighs the normal, familiar matter we know in our daily lives. One way astronomers study this lightless stuff is to measure how dark matter gravitationally warps light from more distant objects. Researchers use that telltale effect to map the enigmatic substance's distribution across the universe. Decades ago Anthony Tyson, now an astrophysicist at the University of California Davis, wanted to do just that. 'I proposed a project to [what was then] the biggest telescope, the biggest camera that was in existence, and got turned down,' he recalls. In the long run, that failed proposal sent him down the path to build his own superlative telescope, which boasts the biggest digital camera in the world, at the Rubin Observatory, where he was founding director and is now chief scientist. In the short run, however, he took an approach that now seems prophetic. 'I decided maybe I should make another application to take the same data but for a different purpose,' he says. He and his colleagues wrote up a different proposal for the same telescope, this time pitching a study of radio-bright plasma jets emanating from around the supermassive black holes at the core of galaxies. He got the observing time—as well as the warped light from invisible clumps of dark matter strewn along the telescope's line of sight. 'That was the scam,' he quips. Now, decades later, the Rubin Observatory is opening astronomers' eyes to a new view of the universe. And while it won't observe radio light, it certainly will observe oodles of active galactic nuclei—by the tens of millions, in fact, repaying Tyson's slyly earned telescope time many times over.
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Netflix to Add NASA+ as It Launches Into Live Streaming Feeds
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