Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids and Failed Supernovas

(quantamagazine.org)

28 points by adm46 hours ago

4 comments

cogogo1 hour ago
The idea of predicting an imminent impactor is very cool. I heard the boom from a confirmed bolide explosion on Saturday afternoon in Boston. It was cool. Would love to have seen the actual explosion but it was very overcast and may or may not have been visible in daylight anyway. I would definitely travel if I had a reasonable expectation of seeing one.Edit: This was in fact visible - there is at least one video out there from much further from the likely impact in Cape Cod Bay
boxed1 hour ago
> In Rubin’s first year alone, scientists expect the observatory to find 1 million undiscovered asteroids — as many as have been documented in the previous 200 years of human history — as well as thousands of comets and billions of stars and galaxies.Why stop at 200 years? It's also 300 years and 400 years, or 4 billion years :P
- thrownthatway54 minutes ago
 When did old mate first point a telescope in to the night sky?
Prunkton3 hours ago
interesting, not a single word about satellites and how they are influencing the quality of their work. I would imagine the telescope is affected in particular of this problem by taking constant snapshots of huge areas in the night sky, but nope...
- NitpickLawyer3 hours ago
 Those are filtered in the data processing pipelines, before the data is exported. Streak-detection algorithms work very well, and they can mask known satellites from the data. It was, in fact, a key requirement of them being allowed to operate. VR is sensitive enough that it can sense the "secret" [1] national security sats, so they filter those early in the pipeline, and only issue alerts for things that are not satellites.[1] - <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rubin-telescope-spy-satellite/680814/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...</a>
- Jach3 hours ago
 From the observatory itself: <a href="https://rubinobservatory.org/for-scientists/frequently-asked-questions/leo-sats" rel="nofollow">https://rubinobservatory.org/for-scientists/frequently-asked...</a>
 - WithinReason2 hours ago
 I'm glad it's not a huge issue:"Simulations of the LSST observing cadence and 40,000 LEO satellites show that about 10% of all LSST images would contain at least one satellite trail""Satellites and debris dimmer than 6th to 7th visual magnitude still cause streaks and glints, but typically leave the rest of the pixels scientifically usable."
- thrownthatway49 minutes ago
 It’s such a non-problem it’s not even worth mentioning.The surface of the Earth is big. If you place 40,000 car sized objects on it in random places, you’d not be able to see then from low earth orbit.That’s approximately how irrelevant they are in the sky.
 - thombat27 minutes ago
 This overlooks that the Rubin telescope has a relatively wide field of view and a thirty second exposure time, so LEO satellites do routinely appear in images. The size of the object isn't so important as its relative brightness, so while a car on the surface of the Earth is hard to locate from 400km above, a sunlit car 400km up in the night sky is visible to the naked eye.
haeseong4 hours ago
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