Latest news with #Ivezić
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
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
Boston Globe
24-06-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Vera Rubin scientists reveal telescope's first images
Over the next decade, the imagery will be patched together to create 'the greatest movie of all time,' Ivezić said. The observatory, named after astronomer Vera Rubin, is a joint venture of the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. It was built on a mountain in northern Chile in the foothills of the Andes at the edge of the Atacama Desert. The location, high and dry, provides clear skies for observing the cosmos. At the news conference Monday, Ivezić explained that part of Rubin's powerful capability was that its singular data set would serve many different science goals. Advertisement The observatory's treasure trove of data will allow astronomers to investigate dark energy, a force pushing the universe to expand ever faster, as well as dark matter, a mysterious substance that behaves somewhat like galactic glue. Closer to Earth, it will identify asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth. When asked about what surprises might be hiding in the data, Federica Bianco, Rubin's deputy project scientist, said that these were unknown unknowns. 'It's really an adventurous horizon,' she said. Advertisement Two of the first images show snippets of the Virgo Cluster, a group of galaxies some 65 million light-years away. In the foreground are bright stars that lie within our Milky Way galaxy. In the background are many extremely distant galaxies, with a reddish hue, because in an expanding universe, distant objects are moving away at high speeds. In the middle are galaxies within the Virgo cluster. The blue dots within galaxies are star-forming regions with younger, hotter stars. But each snippet shared Monday is but a tiny piece of the full image produced by the telescope. The level of detail in the Rubin images is impossible to convey on a computer screen or a newspaper page. As a result, the Rubin team has developed Skyviewer, which lets people zoom in and out of the giant images. 'We needed to make dynamic ways to share the data,' Steven Ritz, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the project scientist for Rubin construction, said in an interview. 'We knew the images were so big that if you zoomed all the way out, it would kind of look like porridge. You wouldn't see the richness. You had to be able to zoom in.' With Skyviewer, anyone can carry the cosmos around on a smartphone. 'You can have 6 billion pixels in your pocket,' Ritz said. 'It's really cool.' Most of the celestial objects do not yet have names, because they are being viewed for the first time. The software tool allows one to hear the images too. 'We built in an ability to interact, to experience the data, not with your eyes, but with your ears,' Ritz said. 'That matters to some people who, of course, only have a capability with their ears. But I think it's valuable for everybody.' Advertisement Ivezić also showed streaks of asteroids photo-bombing the cosmic images. The observatory's software automatically removes them from pictures of the distant universe. It also calculates orbits of the asteroids. In just a few nights of observations, it discovered 2,104 new asteroids. Seven of them are near-Earth asteroids, although none are on a collision course with Earth. The rest are in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Another image showed a riotously pink view of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas. The two sprawling clouds of dust and gas, thousands of light-years away from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, have been photographed often by both amateurs and professional astronomers. More powerful instruments have taken more detailed photos, but with their narrow field of view, they only see a small slice of the scene. The blue regions are lit up by light from young, hot stars and scattered by dust, said Clare Higgs, an outreach specialist working for Rubin. The pinkish colors most likely come from emissions of excited hydrogen atoms, and the dark tendrils are lanes of dust. Construction of the Rubin Observatory began a decade ago. The completed telescope recorded its first bits of light on April 15. Rubin is far from the largest telescope in the world, but it is a technological marvel. The main structure of the telescope, with a 28-foot-wide primary mirror, an 11-foot-wide secondary mirror and the world's largest digital camera, floats on a thin layer of oil. Magnetic motors twirl the 300-ton structure around -- at full speed, it could complete one full rotation in a little more than half a minute. Advertisement Its unique design means Rubin can gaze deep, wide and fast, allowing the telescope to quickly pan across the sky, taking some 1,000 photos per night. By scanning the entire sky every three to four days for 10 years, it will discover millions of exploding stars, space rocks flying past and patches of warped space-time that produce distorted, fun-house views of distant galaxies. 'You've not seen the whole thing, all captured at once at this depth with so many objects there,' Ritz said. 'That, I would point out, is new. And just how pretty it is.' This article originally appeared in
