How the Vera Rubin Telescope Might Find Hidden Planets and Alien Spacecraft

by NASA James Webb . Space Telescope was a huge boon for space science when it was launched into orbit on Christmas Day last year. But the $10 billion JWST, for all its amazing possibilities, sees only a small sliver of the sky at a time—and only in a particular spectrum. The infrared rays spectrum.

That’s why scientists are so excited about the next big thing in giant telescopes. The Vera Rubin Observatory, perched atop an 8,900-foot mountain in northern Chile, is on track for completion by the end of 2023. The US National Science Foundation has poured $300 million into the observatory’s construction. since 2007. Private investors have also contributed.

Rubin Observatory’s 28-foot-diameter telescope and 3.2-gigapixel camera see a vast expanse of sky in optics spectrum. Essentially the same part of the spectrum that we see with our own eyes.

Consider JWST and Rubin as partners. Ranpal Gill, the observatory’s communications director, told The Daily Beast: “They’re free. “Rubin is optical with a large [field of view]JWST is infrared with a smaller FOV.”

Ideally, the two telescopes will work together after Rubin starts taking the first pictures, several months after construction is finished. Because it swept through a 3.5-degree arc—that’s a hundred times wider field of view than that of JWST—Rubin was able to see the panorama across the entire southern sky. And then tell JWST where to focus the infrared sensor, narrower, can collect information about the temperature and material composition of the object. “There is a possibility that we will discover interesting objects for JWST to track,” Gill said.

Just because of two telescopes maybe do you work together? yes to, however. The scientists brainstormed what they would do with Rubin—alone or in conjunction with JWST—starting more than a year from now.

Check out comets. Looking for a hypothetical ninth planet orbiting the way out there in the shadow of the outer solar system. Identify strange interstellar objects that at least one physicist believes may be alien crafts. The list goes on and on.

H Stockebrand/Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA

Pedro Bernardinelli, a University of Pennsylvania astronomer, told The Daily Beast: “I think it’s fair to say that Rubin will be a variable telescope system like JWST. “The main idea, however, is that they do very different things: JWST will allow us to measure things really well in infrared, while Rubin will allow us to map large areas of the world. The sky is incredibly deep and very fast, so we’ll not only see what’s out there, but how these things are changing over time.”

Bernardinelli said he will focus Rubin on smaller, faster and more exotic objects in the solar system; as well as larger, slower, and equally strange objects located far away go beyond solar energy systems. Close-up: comet and asteroid. In the distance: flashing stars and supernovas.

A short-term priority should be Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, said Bernardinelli. Likely 100 miles wide, Bernardinelli-Bernstein—“BB,” as it is known—may be the largest comets that humans have ever observed. It may also be the most pristine, because it has spent most of its billion-year existence in the cold dark depths of the outer solar system, where nothing can touch or melt it. .

And as readers are probably sure, the comet is named in part after its co-discoverer, Bernardinelli himself. “Not much has happened to this object since its formation in the early days of the solar system,” he said, “and so we can think of it as a window into the past.”

Bernardinelli and his partner Gary Bernstein, also a University of Pennsylvania astronomer, first saw BB in 2014 and since then, they have combined transient observations using telescopes smaller to make some well-founded guesses about the composition of the comet. Much closer examination is needed to know for sure what Bernardinelli-Bernstein looked like—and what it might tell us about the early history of the solar system.

Rubin could be just the thing. “When the Vera Rubin Observatory starts its mission in 2023, it will take a lot of images of this and other objects, so we will essentially have a ‘video’ of the evolution of this object. it for almost 10 years.”

Konstantin Batygin, an astronomer at Caltech, wanted to target Rubin on possible hiding spots of the legendary ninth planet. Or tenthif you are on the side of the large community of astronomers who believe that old the ninth planet, Pluto, should never have been downgraded to a “non-planetary object” in 2006.

A year before the Pluto collision, another Caltech astronomer named Mike Brown and his team discovered an object lurking in the shadows of the Kuiper Belta belt of comets, asteroids, and ice so vast and so far away from the sun that it remains mostly a mystery.

This object appears to be much larger than Pluto. NASA originally described this object, called “Eris,” as the 10th potential planet of the solar system. Then it became ninth planet, after the controversial delisting of Pluto.

It would take some pretty convincing observations to get the entire astronomical community to support Eris as an official replacement for Pluto. Again, Rubin can do the job. Batygin said the new telescope would “provide a huge boost to this search”.

Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA

Don’t Forget ET

As controversial as the hunt for the new ninth planet, a project that Harvard physicist Avi Loeb had in mind so that Rubin could get even than boil. Loeb is said to be strongest advocate for a comprehensive search for alien craft in our own galactic region.

Five years ago, a very strange object made a very strange journey through the solar system. Shiny, reddish, oblong, about 300 to 3,000 feet long and traveling at a dizzying speed of 16 miles per second—the object zooms into our system and passes the sun. When Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk first spotted the object during a telescope survey in October 2017, it was on its way out of our system.

Astronomers were baffled by this object, which they named “‘Oumuamua.” That’s Hawaiian for “recon.” No one knows for sure what ‘Omuamua is – or not.

Only Loeb was willing to say what others might have thought. ‘Oumumua’s speed, direction, and form are possible signs it’s an alien craft. “The possibility of an artificial origin of ‘Oumuamua must be considered,” wrote Loeb in a 2021 study.

It was too late to take a close look at ‘Oumuamua. But if there are other alien ships, Rubin could help astronomers spot them in time to examine the details. The new telescope “will allow us to detect more interstellar objects,” Loeb said.

With Rubin to widen and focus our view, alien ships probably wouldn’t need to be hundreds of feet long to be visible from Earth. In fact, they could be as small as a microwave-sized cubesat satellite and still show up in Rubin’s scans.

Maybe yes so many of interstellar-sized objects passing through the solar system at any given time. “For every ‘Oumuamua-sized object on the scale of a football field, there are a million CubeSats-sized objects,” says Loeb. Each is a potential extraterrestrial vehicle, if you believe Loeb’s argument.

And even if these other star system visitors aren’t aliens, they’re still worth checking out. We already have several telescopes that can detect interstellar objects, aka “ISOs.” But they tend to produce blurry, inaccurate images. Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast: “A telescope like the Vera Rubin Observatory would be even more sensitive to these types of interstellar objects. this star.

After initially detecting a possible interstellar visitor to Rubin, astronomers were able to point JWST at the same object. That way we’ll see how it looks to the naked eye and But also see how it looks in infrared.

The same teamwork — Rubin figured it all out first, JWST focuses on — could begin defining astronomy after 2023. “Humanity will have two different ‘eyes’ for observing the universe, ‘ said Kopparapu.