More details: See here A group of astronomers from across the globe, including a team from the University of Washington and led by Queen's University Belfast, have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects will be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this year.
The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is set to revolutionize our knowledge of the solar system's "small bodies" -- asteroids, comets and other minor planets.
The Rubin Observatory, under construction on the Cerro Pach⁘n ridge in northern Chile, features the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope with a unique three-mirror design capable of surveying the entire visible sky every few nights.
At its heart is the world's largest digital camera -- the 3.2 gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera -- covering a 9.6 square-degree field of view with six filters, roughly 45 times the area of the full moon. Together, this "wide-fast-deep" system will generate 20 terabytes of data every night -- creating an unprecedented time-lapse "movie" of the cosmos over the next 10 years, and an incredibly powerful dataset with which to map the solar system.
"Accurate simulation software like Sorcha is critical," said Schwamb, a reader in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen's University. "It tells us what Rubin will discover and lets us know how to interpret it. Our knowledge of what objects fill Earth's solar system is about to expand exponentially and rapidly."
In addition to the eight major planets, the solar system is home to a vast population of small bodies that formed alongside the planets more than 4.5 billion years ago.
Many of these smaller bodies remain essentially unchanged since the solar system's birth, acting as a fossil record of its earliest days. By studying their orbits, sizes and compositions, astronomers can reconstruct how planets formed, migrated and evolved.
These objects -- numbering in the tens of millions -- -- provide a powerful window into processes such as the delivery of water and organic material to Earth, the reshaping of planetary orbits by giant planets and the ongoing risk posed by those whose paths bring them near our planet.
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