HOW RUBIN WILL CHANGE OUR VIEW

The nearly completed Vera C. Rubin Observatory houses the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope, equipped with a 3,200-megapixel CCD camera — the largest ever built. Once operational, it will continuously survey the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every three to four days for 10 years. This immense effort is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

In 2017, ‘Oumuamua was spotted by the 1.8-meter PanSTARRS1 telescope on Maui. The object was discovered less than a week after making its closest approach to Earth and more than a month after its closest pass of the Sun (called perihelion). In a 2019 interview, astrobiologist Karen Meech told Astronomy that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, had it been operating at the time, should have spotted ‘Oumuamua some three months before PanSTARRS1, before the object had passed perihelion.

The immense database LSST will create — logging some 20 terabytes of data per night for a total of 2 million images over the course of a decade — will be ideal for spotting changes in the sky, including the motions of asteroids and comets. This includes some 6 million moving objects in our solar system, some of which will be only visitors, passing through from other star systems. In a 2023 paper available on the arXiv preprint server and accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal, researchers estimated LSST could find as many as 70 ‘Oumuamua-like interstellar objects each year, with sizes averaging 160 to 1,970 feet (50 to 600 m), though the number heavily depends on how common such travelers are through space, how fast they are moving, and how frequently they visit our solar system. — A.K.