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Yahoo
24-06-2025
- 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. 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. 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. RELATED STORIES — Vera C Rubin Observatory reveals 1st stunning images of the cosmos. Scientists are 'beyond excited about what's coming' — Satellite streaks: Can the huge new Vera Rubin Observatory function in the megaconstellation age? — World's largest digital camera to help new Vera Rubin Observatory make a 'time-lapse record of the universe' (video) "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."
BBC News
23-06-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Vera Rubin: First pictures taken by world's largest digital camera released
The first images captured by the world's most powerful telescope have been photos were taken by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera located at an observatory in the south American country of show the night sky in extraordinary detail, capturing clouds of gas and dust that are several thousand light years away. Scientists are due to reveal more pictures and videos taken by the camera this week. What's the latest? Scientists say the images reveal breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant of the debut images is made up of 678 exposures taken over just seven shows the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula - both located several thousand light-years from Earth, glowing in bright pinks against orange-red image reveals these nebulae within our Milky Way in great detail, with previously faint or invisible features now clearly image shows a view of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, which is about 100 billion times the size of the Milky shows lots of bright stars in the foreground, as well as many galaxies in the aim to photograph the night sky every three days for ten years to show how stars and galaxies move and change over time. What is the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera? According to the Guinness Book of Records, the LSST is not only the largest digital camera but also the one with the highest resolution, which means it can take really detailed top-of-the-range phones have cameras with a resolution of up to 50 megapixels, whereas the LSST has a resolution of 3,200 you definitely can't carry this camera around with you. It's about the same size as a small car and weighs a massive 2, it is kept at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, attached to a powerful mountaintop location provides dark skies and dry air, which are ideal conditions for observing the images it will capture are so large that it would take 400 ultra-high-definition televisions to display one of them at full camera aims to take 1,000 images a night over the next 10 years and the project's mission is to catalogue 20 billion goal is to capture an ultra-wide and ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our say the observatory will transform our understanding of the captured will help scientists answer questions about dark matter, the structure of the Milky Way and the formation of our Solar also think that if a ninth planet exists in our solar system, the telescope would find it in its first year.
The Verge
23-06-2025
- Science
- The Verge
A car-sized camera captures the cosmos.
A car-sized camera captures the cosmos. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released the first images taken by its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera — the largest digital camera ever made — ahead of starting its 10-year survey of the southern sky. You can read up on details about these shots in PetaPixel's report, and more images and video will be released later today following a Rubin Observatory livestream at 11AM ET.
Gizmodo
19-06-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
A Game-Changing Telescope Is About to Reveal Its First Images. Here's How to Watch
A state-of-the-art telescope nearly 25 years in the making will finally reveal its first images on Monday, June 23, and you can watch the event in realtime. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, perched atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, boasts the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy. The telescope, overseen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), will use this car-sized, 3.2-gigapixel camera to capture ultra-high-definition images and videos of the cosmos. During Monday's event, the NSF and DOE will display Rubin's first images to the public and screen one of the observatory's high-resolution time-lapse 'movies' of the visible sky. You can participate by tuning into a livestream or attending one of the in-person watch parties at museums, universities, and planetariums around the world. The observatory will begin livestreaming the event at 11 a.m. ET, and you can watch it right here. You can also use the interactive map on the observatory's website to find a watch party near you. More than two decades after the Rubin observatory was first conceived in a 'back-of-the-napkin' sketch, construction on this huge telescope is finally nearing completion. Monday's event marks the beginning of the observatory's ambitious science operations. Later this year, Rubin will kick off the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)—an unprecedented decade-long survey of the night sky. This endeavor will produce 60 petabytes of data that will help scientists uncover the true natures of dark matter and dark energy, catalog the solar system, explore the changing sky, and understand the structure and function of our Milky Way galaxy. Rubin will use its 27.6-foot (8.4-meter) Simonyi Survey telescope—whose unique three-mirror design includes the largest convex mirror ever made—to observe the cosmos on an automated schedule. Each 30-second exposure will cover an area about 45 times the size of the full moon. The enormous LSST camera will capture wide-field images and stitch them together to create a complete view of the southern sky every three nights. Dedicated computer facilities will process Rubin's data in real time and issue global alerts of changes in the sky within minutes of detection. The observatory's findings will be funneled into a massive archive that will vastly increase the amount of data available to scientists. Researchers led by astronomer Meg Schwamb at Queen's University Belfast recently estimated that Rubin could triple the number of known near-Earth objects (NEOs) from about 38,000 to 127,000, detect ten times more trans-Neptunian objects than currently cataloged, and provide colorful, detailed observations of more than 5 million main-belt asteroids—up from roughly 1.4 million. Papers describing these predictions and the software Schwamb and her colleagues developed to make them, called Sorcha, are currently available on the preprint server arXiv. 'With this data, we'll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot—and potentially deflect—the asteroids that could threaten Earth,' said Mario Juric, a member of the team and an astronomer at the University of Washington, in a university statement. In many ways, the Rubin observatory will carry on the legacy of its namesake, astronomer Vera Rubin. Her work helped prove the existence of dark matter, a paradigm-shifting finding for the field of astronomy. What's more, she published over 100 scientific papers, conducted groundbreaking research on spiral galaxies and galaxy rotation, and served as a trailblazer for women in science. Like Rubin the astronomer, the Rubin observatory will help usher the field into a whole new era of exploration and discovery. With its cutting-edge capabilities, Rubin's first images are sure to dazzle. Monday's event is only the beginning of this observatory's mission to map the cosmos in unprecedented detail, unlocking new insights into the secrets of the universe.
