After a very brief pass at the sky, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has already photographed thousands of objects no other telescope has seen before.
In just 10 hours of observations across seven different nights, the observatory discovered 2,104 brand-new asteroids in the Solar System.
It also snapped a cool 10 million distant galaxies, as well as gleaming nebulas and flashing stars in high-definition videos released overnight.
Jonti Horner, an astronomer from the University of Southern Queensland, said the new haul of asteroids discovered in the first videos was almost a tenth of what had been discovered in 2024.
“It’s astonishing the number of detections found in one field of view,” Professor Horner said.
Most of the asteroids hail from the asteroid belt, which occupies the space between Mars and Jupiter, but there are also clusters around Jupiter and some from beyond Neptune.
“To pick up new objects that are so far away with just 10 hours of observation — it’s really promising,” Professor Horner said.
These super-distant objects move more slowly from Earth’s perspective, which makes them harder to spot with traditional tools — but Rubin is powerful enough to see them.
This is good news for comet spotters, since comets are currently only easy to spot when they get close to the Sun on their elliptical orbits.
“It might be that our next great comet will be discovered by Vera Rubin or by someone looking at Vera Rubin data,” Professor Horner said.
“That will mean we’ll get more prior warning because we’ll find it when it’s further from the Sun, so we’ll have more time to prepare for its arrival.”
Distant galaxies and swirling nebulas
The release follows an early drop of images on Monday showing parts of the Virgo Cluster.
Many of the images contained details never seen before, according to Australian astronomers.
Rachel Webster, an astrophysicist at the University of Mebourne, said she was stunned by the vast scale of each picture.
The observatory has now released an even larger map of the Virgo cluster, with an image compiled from 1,100 separate photographs.
Closer to home, the observatory also released a more detailed view of the Lagoon Nebula and its nearby stellar companions.
This allowed close-up looks at three star clusters near the nebula — Messier 21, Bochum 14 and NCG 6544 — as well as the Trifid Nebula, a dust and gas cloud that Professor Horner described as one of the “jewels of the night sky”.
Telescope to snap images for the next decade
The observatory, which is perched on a mountain in Chile, will take photos of the night sky every few seconds for the next decade.
While it is based in the Southern Hemisphere, Professor Horner said that its latitude of 30 degrees south (roughly in line with Coffs Harbour in New South Wales or Geraldton in Western Australia) means that it will be able to capture most of the celestial sphere around the Earth each year.
It was conceived of initially to help astronomers understand the mysteries of dark matter, by building a detailed time-lapse survey of the sky.
But the observatory will also be important for various other fields of astronomy, from Solar System dynamics to supernovas and bright flashing stars called quasars.
Australia is one of many countries that have helped develop the $ US810 million ($1.2 billion) telescope.
“We’ve had a number of IT people who’ve been working on the data science side of things and that’s worked out really, really well,” Professor Webster said.
In return, they will get access to early data when the telescope is fully operational later this year.