Latest news with #LegacySurveyofSpaceandTime
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Night sky glows purple above Vera Rubin Observatory
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. With no light pollution nearby, the night skies around the Vera Rubin Observatory glow in brilliant colors in this timelapse photo. What is it? The Vera Rubin Observatory is designed to study dark matter, which makes up 85% of our universe but is still unknown to scientists. Dark matter can create various effects in space thanks to its gravity, such as lensing, which astronomers can capture with the observatory's telescopes, hoping to find more about what makes up dark matter. Astronomers are also using these telescopes to study dark energy as well as the Milky Way galaxy and other structures in our universe. Where is it? The Vera Rubin Observatory is located in Cerro Pachón in Chile at an elevation of 5,200 feet (1,600 meters) above sea level. Why is it amazing? In this image, the observatory's opening can be seen thanks to the glow of its its calibration LEDs. As the telescope scans the skies once every three days with the world's largest digital camera, the calibration process helps ensure all the equipment is working properly. The observatory has just begun its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) mission, where it will repeatedly scan the southern sky. Using the largest camera, the observatory captures detailed images that are so large they require a "data butler" to help manage them. Despite the size, the images could be the key to cracking the case of what dark matter truly is. Want to learn more? You can read more about the Vera Rubin Observatory, the legacy of Vera Rubin, and the hunt for dark matter. Solve the daily Crossword
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
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Colossal Telescope in the Desert Just Captured Galaxies We've Never Seen Before
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: After more than a decade under construction, the Vera Rubin Observatory has released its first images, which contain millions of galaxies. These first images are only the brief, initial glimpse of the observatory's 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will discover new objects in the night sky while also (hopefully) answering questions about dark matter and dark energy. As a ground-based telescope, the Vera Rubin Observatory will be a perfect companion to space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, as its sweeping view will completely scan the night sky every three days. On August 1, 2014, workers began construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) perched atop Cerro Pachón in Chile's Atacama Desert. Fast forward a decade later, and the LSST—now called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named for the American astronomer whose groundbreaking work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter—is finally ready to start doing some serious science. Its main mission will be the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (confusingly also abbreviated LSST), which will ceaselessly scan the night sky continuously for 10 years, noting every visible change along the way. Vera Rubin is particularly well-suited for this task—with a 28-foot-wide primary mirror, and 11-foot-wide secondary mirror, and the largest digital camera ever constructed, this terrestrial telescope can move its 300-ton bulk one full rotation in a half a minute at full speed, according to The New York Times. The amount of data Rubin will collect in the next year alone will be more than all other optical observatories combined. To put it mildly, it's an exciting time. To celebrate the beginning of its operation, the observatory has released the first images captured by the telescope. A combination of 678 different images, the photo above shows that brilliant Trifid nebula (top right) with the Lagoon nebula (bottom left), which is located more than 4,000 light-years from Earth. The lead image of this article (an in-depth look at the Virgo cluster) is only 2 percent of a full Rubin image, which would actually require 400 ultra high-definition TVs to display. Below is a labeled image of a swath of galaxies and stars—some of which we know, and many of which we've never seen before. 'These images vividly showcase the unprecedented power that Rubin will use to revolutionize astronomy and our understanding of the Universe,' astronomers Manda Banerji and Phil Wiseman from the University of Southampton wrote in The Conversation. 'Rubin is truly transformative, thanks to its unique combination of sensitivity, vast sky area coverage and exceptional image quality.' It's a big moment for ground-based astronomy, which has often been eclipsed by groundbreaking discoveries made by space-based telescopes like Hubble and JWST. While it's true that these floating telescopes offer a ton of benefits—chief among them being that they circumvent atmospheric interference and the increasing annoyance of satellite disruption (think Starlink)—the benefits of ground-based observatories far outweigh these visual costs. For one, these telescopes can be easily maintained and—crucially—upgraded with the latest and greatest technologies because... you know... they're on the ground. And without the need for payload restrictions, ground-based telescopes can be absolutely gargantuan (look no further than the adequately named Extremely Large Telescope, also under construction in the Atacama Desert). A quick comparison: JWST's Near Infrared Camera has a field of view of roughly 0.05 square degrees, whereas Vera Rubin has a full 9.6 square degrees. That means it can simply see way more sky than its space-based cousins. Rubin will also be able to produce incredibly high-definition photographs in just a few days, rather than the few years needed by other telescopes. At the end of its 10-year LSST mission, Rubin will provide invaluable data for investigating dark energy and dark matter, as well as information regarding some 20 billion galaxies. Rubin will also observe billions of objects on more than 800 separate occasions, which will create a kind of astronomical movie detailing the evolution of the night sky over time. Especially excitingly, it will capture asteroids as they move through the Solar System. The Observatory estimates that LSST will discover five million asteroids in the next few years alone—five times more than what humanity has discovered in the last two centuries. After decades of waiting, it's time for the science to finally commence. '[Vera Rubin] represents the culmination of about two decades of dedication, innovation, and collaboration by a global team,' Željko Ivezić, Director of Rubin Observatory Construction, said in a press statement. 'With construction now complete, we're turning our eyes fully to the sky—not just to take images, but to begin a whole new era of discovery.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
What are the chances of Earth being hit by a big asteroid?
A week ago, the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images. It also included a video of all the asteroids it discovered. In just 10 hours, the Simonyi Survey Telescope with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera captured more than 2,000 previously undetected asteroids. It's a reminder that, while there's a lot of space in space, our solar system still has a lot going on. Asteroids are rocks and debris left over from the formation of our solar system. There are two main areas where much of it is located. The first being the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The second is the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of Neptune. But there are still many more floating around out there. WATCH | See a swarm of newly discovered asteroids Scientists estimate that roughly 44 tonnes of meteoric debris fall toward Earth every day. That's right: every day. The good news is that most of it burns up in our atmosphere. But what are the chances that a much larger object is on a collision course with Earth? "Earth has been hit in the past by large asteroids, and presumably, if we waited long enough, something would happen. But the risk is very, very small," said Paul Weigert, a professor at Western University's department of physics and astronomy in London, Ont. "So none of the asteroids that we know about today have a significant chance of striking Earth in the next 100 years or so. So that's a pretty healthy time horizon." However, there's no guarantee that something that has thus far been undetected isn't on its way. "As we go beyond that, there's always the chance that we can discover new asteroids, of course, and they become not unpredictable, but harder to predict in great detail, at longer distances," Weigert added. The importance of being earnest There are numerous groups scanning the sky looking for asteroids, and Weigert said that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory ramps up the search like never before. "The Vera Rubin telescope is really going to revolutionize the way this kind of work is done. I think even people who knew what to expect, that knew this was coming down the pipeline, were impressed by the way LSST-Rubin was able really dive right in and start finding these things," he said. "So that's going to be a very impressive discovery machine going forward." NASA has found more than 1.4 billion asteroids, and believes it has identified more than 95 per cent of asteroids one kilometre or larger in our solar system. It's estimated that the Rubin observatory will discover 89,000 near-Earth objects and 3.7 million main-belt asteroids. Now, getting hit by an asteroid is a really a matter of odds. Smaller objects, such as asteroids about 10 metres in diameter impact Earth once a decade. While not planetary ending, they can break windows. The Chelyabinsk meteorite that exploded over Russia in 2013 was twice this size, and did indeed break windows, which injured roughly 1,500 people. WATCH | News report on 2013 meteorite that struck Russia The bigger the rock, the less often they impact Earth. For example, a 140-metre asteroid impacts Earth roughly once every 1,000 years and one that is about one kilometre in size impacts Earth roughly every 700,000 years. An asteroid that size would be devastating. The one that is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs was about 10 to 15 kilometres in size. Those impacts are estimated to happen about once every 100 million years. Jim Freemantle is project manager for the OSIRIS-REx laser altimeter project at York University in Toronto. OSIRIS-REx was the sample-return mission to the asteroid Bennu. He has a tiny piece of the asteroid in his lab. He believes it's important to track and better understand asteroids overall. "I don't lie awake wondering about, you know, is a dinosaur-killer asteroid gonna come and destroy us all. We've got other things to worry about," he said. "It is something that I think that it's prudent to begin to think about, measuring where or looking for where asteroids are, because sometimes they sneak up on us." He also said that he's excited to have these observation systems in place, and also by plans to try to deflect any asteroid that might be on a collision course with Earth. In particular, he noted NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission to a two-asteroid system. The goal was to see if we could move an asteroid by slamming something into one. The spacecraft crashed into one of the asteroids to see if doing so could change its orbit. It was deemed a success. And now the European Space Agency has a spacecraft on its way back to the system for more follow-up observations. Asteroid to impact the moon? Weigert and his team recently released a pre-print study about 2024 YR4, a newly discovered asteroid 60 metres in size that, at one point this year, raised some concerns about its chance that it would impact Earth in 2032. But we've now been given the green light to stop worrying about that, as astronomers have refined the asteroid's orbit somewhat, and it turns out that it won't impact Earth. However, there's still a four per cent chance it will hit the moon. In the new study from Weigert and his colleagues calculated what that might look like. WATCH | How worried should we be about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth? | Hanomansing Tonight He said that typically, when an asteroid hits the moon or any planet without an atmosphere, it makes a crater about 10 times its own size. As for 2024 YR4, if it hits the moon, rocks and debris will blast out with most falling back down the the lunar surface. But some of those tiny rocks could make their way to Earth, the authors said. "If it hits in the right spot, quite a bit of material could be delivered to Earth in the form of basically small lunar rocks, maybe centimetre-size or millimetre-size, perfect for making shooting stars, falling stars, and that would produce quite a wonderful meteor shower on Earth over several days, depending again and exactly where it strikes the moon," Weigert said. But, that would also pose a bit of a threat to satellites. But Weigert anticipates that as the orbit is further refined — which won't happen until 2028 the earliest, as its currently behind the sun — the chances of this happening will drop to zero. Weigert also explained why it takes time to get a better estimate at the path of an asteroid. "You can see it move across the sky very, very well, but it's actually very, very difficult to tell how far away it is," he said. "It's only after watching it over a long period of time and knowing about the laws of physics and how gravity affects the orbit, that you can really refine it and say, 'Okay, if it's following the laws of physics, which it should be doing, that it's traveling along this path.'" When asked if he loses any sleep over the possibility of an asteroid hitting Earth, Weigert said quite simply, "No." "We've seen most of the really dangerous asteroids, and we're continuing to work diligently to find as many more of the slightly less but still somewhat dangerous asteroids, and especially with something like the Rubin observatory coming online here, now that that task is going to sort of move to completion even faster than it has been."
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Artist impression of a large asteroid impacting on Earth such as the Chicxulub event that caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, 66 million years ago. Shown in the background are planet Mars and asteroid bodies.
A week ago, the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images. It also included a video of all the asteroids it discovered. In just 10 hours, the Simonyi Survey Telescope with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera captured more than 2,000 previously undetected asteroids. It's a reminder that, while there's a lot of space in space, our solar system still has a lot going on. Asteroids are rocks and debris left over from the formation of our solar system. There are two main areas where much of it is located. The first being the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The second is the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of Neptune. But there are still many more floating around out there. WATCH | See a swarm of newly discovered asteroids Scientists estimate that roughly 44 tonnes of meteoric debris fall toward Earth every day. That's right: every day. The good news is that most of it burns up in our atmosphere. But what are the chances that a much larger object is on a collision course with Earth? "Earth has been hit in the past by large asteroids, and presumably, if we waited long enough, something would happen. But the risk is very, very small," said Paul Weigert, a professor at Western University's department of physics and astronomy in London, Ont. "So none of the asteroids that we know about today have a significant chance of striking Earth in the next 100 years or so. So that's a pretty healthy time horizon." However, there's no guarantee that something that has thus far been undetected isn't on its way. "As we go beyond that, there's always the chance that we can discover new asteroids, of course, and they become not unpredictable, but harder to predict in great detail, at longer distances," Weigert added. The importance of being earnest There are numerous groups scanning the sky looking for asteroids, and Weigert said that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory ramps up the search like never before. "The Vera Rubin telescope is really going to revolutionize the way this kind of work is done. I think even people who knew what to expect, that knew this was coming down the pipeline, were impressed by the way LSST-Rubin was able really dive right in and start finding these things," he said. "So that's going to be a very impressive discovery machine going forward." NASA has found more than 1.4 billion asteroids, and believes it has identified more than 95 per cent of asteroids one kilometre or larger in our solar system. It's estimated that the Rubin observatory will discover 89,000 near-Earth objects and 3.7 million main-belt asteroids. Now, getting hit by an asteroid is a really a matter of odds. Smaller objects, such as asteroids about 10 metres in diameter impact Earth once a decade. While not planetary ending, they can break windows. The Chelyabinsk meteorite that exploded over Russia in 2013 was twice this size, and did indeed break windows, which injured roughly 1,500 people. WATCH | News report on 2013 meteorite that struck Russia The bigger the rock, the less often they impact Earth. For example, a 140-metre asteroid impacts Earth roughly once every 1,000 years and one that is about one kilometre in size impacts Earth roughly every 700,000 years. An asteroid that size would be devastating. The one that is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs was about 10 to 15 kilometres in size. Those impacts are estimated to happen about once every 100 million years. Jim Freemantle is project manager for the OSIRIS-REx laser altimeter project at York University in Toronto. OSIRIS-REx was the sample-return mission to the asteroid Bennu. He has a tiny piece of the asteroid in his lab. He believes it's important to track and better understand asteroids overall. "I don't lie awake wondering about, you know, is a dinosaur-killer asteroid gonna come and destroy us all. We've got other things to worry about," he said. "It is something that I think that it's prudent to begin to think about, measuring where or looking for where asteroids are, because sometimes they sneak up on us." He also said that he's excited to have these observation systems in place, and also by plans to try to deflect any asteroid that might be on a collision course with Earth. In particular, he noted NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission to a two-asteroid system. The goal was to see if we could move an asteroid by slamming something into one. The spacecraft crashed into one of the asteroids to see if doing so could change its orbit. It was deemed a success. And now the European Space Agency has a spacecraft on its way back to the system for more follow-up observations. Asteroid to impact the moon? Weigert and his team recently released a pre-print study about 2024 YR4, a newly discovered asteroid 60 metres in size that, at one point this year, raised some concerns about its chance that it would impact Earth in 2032. But we've now been given the green light to stop worrying about that, as astronomers have refined the asteroid's orbit somewhat, and it turns out that it won't impact Earth. However, there's still a four per cent chance it will hit the moon. In the new study from Weigert and his colleagues calculated what that might look like. WATCH | How worried should we be about an asteroid hurtling toward Earth? | Hanomansing Tonight He said that typically, when an asteroid hits the moon or any planet without an atmosphere, it makes a crater about 10 times its own size. As for 2024 YR4, if it hits the moon, rocks and debris will blast out with most falling back down the the lunar surface. But some of those tiny rocks could make their way to Earth, the authors said. "If it hits in the right spot, quite a bit of material could be delivered to Earth in the form of basically small lunar rocks, maybe centimetre-size or millimetre-size, perfect for making shooting stars, falling stars, and that would produce quite a wonderful meteor shower on Earth over several days, depending again and exactly where it strikes the moon," Weigert said. But, that would also pose a bit of a threat to satellites. But Weigert anticipates that as the orbit is further refined — which won't happen until 2028 the earliest, as its currently behind the sun — the chances of this happening will drop to zero. Weigert also explained why it takes time to get a better estimate at the path of an asteroid. "You can see it move across the sky very, very well, but it's actually very, very difficult to tell how far away it is," he said. "It's only after watching it over a long period of time and knowing about the laws of physics and how gravity affects the orbit, that you can really refine it and say, 'Okay, if it's following the laws of physics, which it should be doing, that it's traveling along this path.'" When asked if he loses any sleep over the possibility of an asteroid hitting Earth, Weigert said quite simply, "No." "We've seen most of the really dangerous asteroids, and we're continuing to work diligently to find as many more of the slightly less but still somewhat dangerous asteroids, and especially with something like the Rubin observatory coming online here, now that that task is going to sort of move to completion even faster than it has been."
