Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids, Failed Supernovas, and Interstellar Visitors | Quanta Magazine
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Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids, Failed Supernovas, and Interstellar Visitors
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astronomy
Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids, Failed Supernovas, and Interstellar Visitors
By
Jonathan O'Callaghan
May 15, 2026
Astronomers are preparing for a new era of big-data astronomy, and results are already starting to arrive.
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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory sits at the summit of Cerro Pachón, accessible by a 35-kilometer drive on winding mountain roads.
NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA/A. Pizarro D.
Introduction
By Jonathan O'Callaghan
Contributing Writer
May 15, 2026
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Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter Telescope, Rubin is designed to study our constantly moving and changing universe in greater detail than ever before. Once every few days for a decade, Rubin will take images of the entire night sky over the Southern Hemisphere, creating the world’s largest time-lapse movie.
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.
“We’ve never had this kind of explosion of discovery within astronomy,” said Sarah Greenstreet, an astronomer at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory.
A little over a decade after the first stone was laid to build Rubin’s home on the mountaintop of Cerro Pachón, the observatory is now a reality, outfitted with a telescope with three mirrors, the largest of which measures 8.4 meters across, and a car-size digital camera, the largest on Earth. It has begun collecting preliminary images.
“It almost doesn’t feel real that we’re actually getting data from Rubin,” said Matt Nicholl, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “To see stuff being found is a dream come true.”
Astronomers are poring over the initial data, and they’re pleased with what they’re finding: rapidly spinning asteroids; myriad exploding stars; and even a rare glimpse of an object passing by from another solar system. “It’s really living up to expectations,” said Michael Frazer, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia.
Spinning Asteroids
As the observatory goes through its final tuning, Rubin’s images have not yet reached the sharpness that scientists expect. But some Rubin science is less dependent on image quality, including its searches for asteroids and comets. This means that, even in the images taken so far, astronomers have been able to make discoveries.
In June 2025, Rubin released a set of images taken during its “first light,” including photographs of 1,500 new asteroids. In January, researchers announced that 19 of those asteroids were spinning especially rapidly. The quickest of these “superfast rotators,” an asteroid with a diameter almost twice the height of the Empire State Building, called 2025 MN45, completes a revolution every 1.88 minutes.
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The 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time will alert scientists to transient objects in the night sky. It is expected to find millions of new asteroids.
NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory
While scientists have spotted asteroids that spin faster, they’ve tended to be much smaller — between 10 and a few hundred meters. For asteroids the size of 2025 MN45, about 700 meters (2,300 feet) across on average, “we didn’t expect we would find something [spinning] faster than 10 minutes,” said Dmitrii Vavilov of the University of Washington, a co-author on the discovery paper.
Most asteroids of this size are thought to be piles of rubble, conglomerations of rock loosely held together by gravity. But 2025 MN45 must have a more solid structure; otherwise its own spin would tear it apart. It might be the fragmented chunk of a...