Every year, telescopes across the globe and spacecraft in orbit discover approximately 20,000 previously unidentified asteroids. Nevertheless, the latest images captured by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory unveiled around 2,000 previously unknown asteroids after approximately 10 hours of scanning the night sky.

With numerous telescopes on Earth and satellites in space actively searching for new celestial bodies that could potentially endanger our planet, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, primarily funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, was not originally designed to function as a comprehensive asteroid detection system.

Despite not being specifically tailored for this purpose, this state-of-the-art observatory, equipped with advanced machine-learning technology, has proven to be the most efficient at identifying interstellar objects traversing through our solar system, as confirmed by the NSF.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory took two decades to complete and was named after the American astronomer credited with the first evidence of dark matter.

Later this year, work will begin creating the largest astronomical movie yet of the Southern Hemisphere, known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, using a camera of the same name.

The LSST Camera is the largest digital camera in the world with a field of view of about 45 times the area of the full Moon in the night sky. One image would need 400 Ultra HD TV screens to display.

On Monday, the Rubin team revealed the first images taken by the observatory, including parts of the Milk Way and beautiful spiral galaxies. Among the first images were more than 2,000 asteroids, including seven near-Earth asteroids previously undocumented in NASA’s Small-Body Database.

A timelapse video shows how the Observatory’s powerful camera tracked the moving dots in the sky. On night one, nearly 1,000 asteroids were found.

By the end of a week of observations lasting a few hours each night, the observatory had found more than 2,100 never-before-seen in our solar system in just a fraction of the night sky it will eventually scan.

These new asteroids, including seven near-Earth asteroids, pose no danger to our planet. 

According to the NSF, Rubin will discover millions of new asteroids within the first two years of observations.