The Rubin Observatory makes its debut — and the discoveries have already begun

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 GeekWire 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.

The First Look images were gathered during just over 10 hours of test observations.

Check out these videos highlighting Rubin’s high-resolution views:

UW astronomer Željko Ivezić, the director of Rubin construction, said the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope and LSST Camera are designed to create high-resolution, color-coded maps of the night sky at a rate that’s 10 to 100 times faster than previously possible. “This is like comparing the speed of your car to the speed of an airplane,” he said.

With major funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the Rubin Telescope was built on a mountaintop in Chile — which is one of the world’s prime spots for astronomical observations, thanks to its dry air and dark skies.

The construction cost has been estimated at $800 million, which includes tens of millions of dollars that were covered by private contributions from the likes of Microsoft tech pioneers Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi. In recognition of Simonyi’s $20 million donation, the observatory’s 8.4-meter (28-foot) telescope has been named after his family.

The observatory itself is named after the late astronomer Vera Rubin, who analyzed the rotation rate of galaxies to come up with evidence for the existence of dark matter — a mysterious, invisible kind of stuff that makes up more of the universe’s content than the matter we can see.

Fittingly, the Rubin Observatory is expected to shed new light on the nature of dark matter and an equally mysterious phenomenon called dark energy, which appears to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. Rubin will serve as an early warning system for transient cosmic events such as supernova explosions and gamma-ray bursts. And based on computer modeling, the observatory is expected to discover more than 5 million asteroids and other objects in our solar system over the course of its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST.

Ivezić said Rubin stands a good chance of detecting a distant hypothetical world that’s been dubbed Planet Nine, if it exists.

“We will see way beyond the orbits where Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects are found,” he said. “It depends on the object size, but we could see Pluto even if it were at a 10 times larger distance, roughly speaking.”

The observatory could also spot interstellar objects such as ‘Oumuamua and Borisov, the two only known such objects discovered to date.

“It is very hard to predict how many we would discover, because we don’t understand the population,” Ivezić said. “It’s only two objects. But by simple scaling arguments, we do expect 10, maybe 20, somewhere in there. So we will be an extremely powerful solar system survey.”

The speed and breadth of Rubin’s observations will be the keys to its discoveries. The LSST Camera is regarded as the world’s largest digital camera, capable of capturing 3,200-megapixel images at a rapid-fire pace. Each image spans an area equivalent to about 45 full moons. About 20 trillion bytes of astronomical data are expected to be produced on a nightly basis and analyzed with the aid of sophisticated computer tools — including tools developed by the DiRAC Institute.

Over the course of the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, Rubin’s images will cover the full stretch of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere every three or four nights, creating time-lapse movies of the changing cosmos.

“The movie has started, the camera is running,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a video clip that was played during today’s briefing.

The University of Washington, which was one of the original partners in the project, is planning a presentation about the Rubin Observatory at 7 p.m. PT Thursday at Kane Hall on the Seattle campus. Check out UW’s website for further information and to register. In the meantime, feast your eyes on the images below.

This is an updated version of a report first published on June 22.