New facility to detect millions of new solar system objects, say NI-led astronomers
The brand new facility at NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will revolutionise the world's knowledge of the solar system's 'small bodies': asteroids, comets and other minor planets.
At the heart of the Rubin Observatory is the fastest moving telescope equipped with the world's largest digital camera.
A single image from the telescope covers a patch of sky roughly 45 times the area of the full moon.
This 'wide-fast-deep' system will spend the next ten years observing the night sky to produce the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
Astronomers say the system will provide unprecedented time-lapse footage of the cosmos and a powerful dataset with which to map the solar system.
New open-source software has also been created to predict what discoveries are likely to be made, with a series of papers describing the software soon to be published by The Astronomical Journal.
The group of astronomers has been led by Dr Meg Schwamb of Queen's University Belfast's School of Mathematics and Physics.
Dr Schwamb said the world's knowledge of what objects fill the Earth's solar system 'is about to expand exponentially and rapidly'.
QUB PhD student Joe Murtagh is one of the lead authors of the prediction studies and among those whose papers have been submitted to the Astronomical Journal.
He said: 'It's very exciting – we expect that millions of new solar system objects will be detected and most of these will be picked up in the first few years of sky survey.'
"With the LSST catalogue of solar system objects, our work shows that it will be like going from black-and-white television to brilliant colour.'
Beyond just finding these new small bodies, Rubin Observatory will observe them multiple times in different optical filters, revealing their surface colours. Past solar system surveys, typically observed only in a single filter.
To forecast which small bodies will be discovered, the team built Sorcha, the first end-to-end simulator that ingests Rubin's planned observing schedule.
It applies assumptions on how Rubin Observatory observes and detects astronomical sources in its images with the best model of what the solar system and its small body reservoirs look like today.
The team's simulations show that Rubin will map 127,000 near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets whose orbits cross or approach the planet.
It will also study over five million main-belt asteroids and 109,000 Jupiter Trojans, bodies which share Jupiter's orbit at stable 'Lagrange' points.
Some 37,000 trans-Neptunian objects, which are residents of the distant Kuiper Belt, will also be mapped, along with around 1,500 to 2,000 Centaurs.
The Sorcha code is open-source and freely available with the simulated catalogues, animations, and pre-prints of the papers publicly available at https://sorcha.space.
News Catch Up - Tuesday 3 June
By making these resources available, the Sorcha team has enabled researchers worldwide to refine their tools and be ready for the flood of LSST data that Rubin will generate, advancing the understanding of the small bodies that illuminate the solar system like never before.
Rubin Observatory is scheduled to unveil its first spectacular imagery at its 'First Look' event on June 23, offering the world an early glimpse of the survey's power. Full science operations are slated to begin later this year.
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