After more than 20 years of planning and construction, astronomers celebrated the release of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory today — and also registered hundreds of the first discoveries from the world’s newest eye on the sky.
University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, a member of the Rubin team and director of UW’s DiRAC Institute, said that discovery data for 2,104 previously undetected small bodies in the solar system were reported to the Minor Planet Center early today.
Those small bodies include 2,015 main-belt asteroids, nine trans-Neptunian objects and seven near-Earth objects. (But don’t worry: None of those NEOs has a chance of hitting Earth anytime soon.)
“The over 2,100 asteroids we discovered are impressive, but just a drop in the bucket relative to what’s coming. We’ll have moments where we find over 20,000 in a single night, more than the entire world presently finds in a year,” Juric told me in an email.
“By sometime next year Rubin will double the number of known asteroids, then continue to discover hundreds of new comets, the remaining few dwarf planets, and maybe even a new planet in our solar system,” he said. “This will be the most comprehensive census of our planetary home in history.”
During today’s “First Look” briefing in Washington, D.C., astronomers explained the science behind their scan for asteroids — and showed off eye-pleasing imagery that included a colorful wide-angle view of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas in the constellation Sagittarius, galactic closeups gleaned from the observatory’s survey of the Virgo Cluster, and a zooming video scan of the same region of the sky.
