Vera Rubin Telescope Quickly Found 1,200 New Asteroids

More than a million asteroids, some of them potential threats to Earth. Asteroids with tails like comets. Interstellar objects that happen to be swinging by our sun. (Could they be alien spaceships?) More distant worlds including, perhaps, a ninth planet, which could fill in the story of our solar system’s turbulent youth.

Those are some of the discoveries that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is expected to make in the cosmic neighborhood that is our solar system. (Maybe not the alien spaceships.)

“I think that we’re going to completely transform our view of the solar system and rewrite that textbook over the next few years.” said Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Saving the Planet While Stargazing

Rubin’s scans of the night sky will also help make Earth a safer place, spotting potentially dangerous asteroids that have so far eluded detection.

Most asteroids are found in the belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But some of those space rocks have been deflected onto paths that could cross paths with our planet.

Astronomers are certain that there is nothing the size of the six-mile-wide asteroid that killed the dinosaurs that poses a danger of colliding with Earth anytime soon. But for smaller asteroids, they are not so certain.