New Vera Rubin Observatory discovers 2,000 unknown asteroids within 10 hours

While about 20,000 previously unknown asteroids are discovered every year by telescopes around the world and spacecraft in orbit, the first images by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory revealed 2,000 undiscovered asteroids taken during about 10 hours of scanning the night sky.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.