Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile spots over 11,000 asteroids
Big news from Chile: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has spotted over 11,000 brand-new asteroids.
Even cooler, it also helped track down more than 80,000 known asteroids, including some that had previously been observed but later lost.
All these discoveries are now up on the observatory's Rubin Orbitviewer and Rubin Asteroid Discoveries Dashboard for anyone curious to check out.
Rubin Observatory camera scans southern sky
The secret is Rubin's insanely powerful digital camera, the biggest in the world, which scans the southern sky with incredible detail.
Thanks to this tech, the team also found 33 new near-Earth objects and about 380 far-out trans-Neptunian objects (think: icy worlds way past Neptune).
Astrophysicist Matthew Holman said finding these distant objects is like searching for a needle in a field of haystacks—out of millions of flickering sources in the sky.