New Telescope Finds 2,100 New Asteroids, Could Discover New Planet

The Vera Rubin telescope in Cerro Pachón, Chile, found 1,200 Asteroids on its early May test run. The telescope employs a cutting-edge new method and, for the first time, can detect a hypothetical planet nine beyond the Kuiper Belt.

The Telescope works by taking two pictures of the same area within 20 minutes. Asteroids move fast compared to stars and planets. So, if you compare the two images, only asteroids will seem to move. This movement is just enough to determine where the asteroid will be in three days. Then, scientists check this area in three days using the same method, and if the object appears again, then they have found a brand new asteroid!

Detecting asteroids is necessary, not only for scientific reasons, but also for safety reasons. Rubin finds asteroids that are coming close to the Earth, and alerts people if needed. Although there are no asteroids like the one known for killing the dinosaurs, smaller ones are observed. Most start in the Asteroid Belt between Jupiter and Mars, and a planet deflects them towards Earth. There are about 25,000 asteroids measuring at least 460 feet wide (large enough to destroy a city) near Earth. Only 44% have been located, but Rubin will probably increase that to 70% in a decade.

And so far it has worked. Rubin has found an asteroid two-thirds of a mile wide that will pass 70,000 miles from Earth. For comparison, the Moon is about 240,000 miles from the Earth, and the Earth orbits at around the Sun at around 67,000 miles an hour. The asteroid will miss us by just an hour!

For scientific purposes, the number of objects discovered will help scientists understand celestial oddities. One group of oddities is asteroids with a tail, similar to a comet. Scientists are still confused about what causes them. Is it collision debris, or is it just evaporating gases? “This is like a brand new field…” Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist, said. “Most people aren’t monitoring asteroids, because no one will give us the observing time to do that.” They are also looking at Kuiper Belt objects, a belt of asteroids beyond Pluto that are “relatively unexplored” according to Dr. Schwamb.

While searching the Kuiper Belt, scientists found orbital anomalies, indicating a planet was tugging on the asteroids. But there’s no planet around there known to us. This is leading scientists to believe there is a “ninth planet” hiding out there. There are still questions whether the telescope will actually “see” the object, or it will have to be mathematically determined, like Neptune. On the other hand, the ninth planet might not exist. “We should know that hopefully within the first two years,” Dr. Schwamb said.

There is so much left to discover in our Solar System. “I think that we’re going to completely transform our view of the solar system and rewrite that textbook over the next few years,” declared Dr. Schwamb.