Chile's Rubin Observatory could revolutionize our study of interstellar objects
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, opening this year, might spot up to 70 interstellar objects every year—way more than ever before.
This could help us learn a lot about these rare visitors from outside our solar system.
How will Rubin find these objects?
With its powerful 3.2-gigapixel camera and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the observatory can scan the entire southern sky every few nights.
Its tech is designed to catch fast and faint objects that older surveys usually miss, making it perfect for finding new interstellar travelers and figuring out how often they show up.
Decades of data in a few years
Over its first decade, Rubin could find dozens to potentially hundreds of these objects, giving scientists tons of data on what they're made of and how they behave.
This would seriously boost our understanding of where these mysterious space rocks come from and their role in the universe.
Only 3 interstellar objects have visited us so far
Comet 3I/ATLAS was just confirmed as only the third known interstellar object to visit us (on July 1, 2025), following 'Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019.
Each discovery opens up new questions—and with Rubin online, we might get answers a lot faster.