Using preliminary data from the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scientists have discovered over 11,000 new asteroids in our solar system. The findings were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (), and include hundreds of distant worlds beyond Neptune as well as 33 previously unknown near-Earth objects.

The discoveries — Rubin Observatory’s largest asteroid haul yet — were made using data from the observatory’s early optimization surveys and processed with software developed at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s . The new findings are a powerful preview of the observatory’s transformative impact on solar system science.

“This first large submission after is just the tip of the iceberg and shows that the observatory is ready,” said , a UW professor of astronomy and leader of Rubin’s solar system team, which is located at the UW. “What used to take years or decades to discover, Rubin will unearth in months. We are beginning to deliver on Rubin’s promise to fundamentally reshape our inventory of the solar system and open the door to discoveries we haven’t yet imagined.”

The submission to MPC comprises approximately 1 million observations, taken over the span of a month and a half, of over 11,000 new asteroids and more than 80,000 already known asteroids, including some that had previously been observed but were later “lost” because their orbits were too uncertain to predict their future locations. The new batch adds to roughly 1,500 asteroids previously discovered by Rubin as part of its First Look project.

The newly discovered near-Earth objects, or NEOs, are small asteroids and comets whose closest approach to the sun is less than 1.3 times the distance between Earth and the sun. None of the new NEOs pose a threat to Earth. Once in full operation, Rubin is expected to reveal an additional nearly 90,000 new NEOs, some of which may be potentially hazardous. By enabling early detection and continuous monitoring of these objects, Rubin will be a powerful tool for planetary defense.

The dataset also contains roughly 380 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) — icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune. Two of the newly discovered TNOs — provisionally named and — have been found to be on extremely large and elongated orbits. At their most distant points, these two objects reach roughly 1,000 times farther away from the sun than the Earth is, placing them among the 30 most distant known asteroids.

A total of 12,700 asteroids discovered with Rubin are shown here during the 1.6 years of observation. The discoveries come in three bursts: 73 were discovered during the first early test observations using Rubin’s Commissioning Camera in late 2024; 1,514 were discovered during First Look observations in April and May 2025; and the recent 11,000 asteroids were discovered in Rubin’s early optimization surveys in Summer 2025.

The discoveries were enabled by Rubin Observatory’s unique combination of a large mirror, the world’s most powerful astronomical digital camera, and highly sophisticated, software-driven pipelines developed at the UW that can detect faint, fast-moving objects against a crowded sky. These capabilities will allow Rubin to build the most detailed census of our solar system ever, and the resulting discoveries will help scientists work out the story of the solar system’s history.

“Rubin’s unique observing cadence required a whole new software architecture for asteroid discovery,” said , a UW research scientist of astronomy who, together with UW astronomy graduate student , built the software that detected them. “We built it, and it works. It seems pretty clear this observatory will revolutionize our knowledge of the asteroid belt.”

Particularly striking is the rapid growth of the TNO population. The 380 candidates discovered by Rubin in less than two months adds to the 5,000 discovered over the past three decades. As with less distant asteroids, finding the TNOs depended critically on developing new sophisticated algorithms.

“Searching for a TNO is like searching for a needle in a field of haystacks — out of millions of flickering sources in the sky, teaching a computer to sift through billions of combinations and identify those that are likely to be distant worlds in our solar system required novel algorithmic approaches,” said , a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and former director of the Minor Planet Center, who spearheaded the work on the TNO discovery pipeline.

“Objects like these offer a tantalizing probe of the solar system’s outermost reaches, from telling us how the planets moved early on in the solar system’s history, to whether a hitherto undiscovered ninth large planet may still be out there,” said , a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who, with Holman, developed the algorithms to detect distant solar system objects with Rubin data.

The verification of this large group of discoveries enables the entire global community to access the data, refine orbits and begin analysis immediately. And these 11,000-some asteroids are just the start. Once the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time () begins later this year, scientists expect Rubin to discover this many asteroids every two to three nights during the early years of the survey. This will ultimately triple the number of known asteroids and increase the number of known TNOs by nearly an order of magnitude.

Rubin Observatory is jointly operated by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC.

For more information, contact Jurić at mjuric@uw.edu.��

This story was adapted from a .

Operations of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Other team members include , a former DiRAC postdoctoral fellow at the UW, now at the Institute for Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of São Paulo; , a UW research software engineer and B612 Asteroid Institute team member who earned his doctorate in astronomy at the UW; , a former UW postdoctoral researcher in astronomy, now at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne; and at Princeton University.

UPDATE (January 27, 2026): This story has been updated to highlight the role of the Simonyi Survey Telescope in the research.

A team led by ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý astronomers has discovered the fastest-ever spinning asteroid with a diameter over half a kilometer. The asteroid — found while analyzing data from the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory — is 0.4 miles in diameter and completes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes.

The study provides crucial information about asteroid composition and evolution. The discovery also demonstrates the potential of the observatory��as it prepares for a 10-year nightly survey of the Southern Hemisphere sky, the .

in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“It’s really exciting that in some of the very first test images taken with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory that we’re already breaking records with the discovery of the fastest-spinning large asteroid found to date,” said lead author , a UW affiliate assistant professor of astronomy and astronomer at . “With millions of new asteroids expected to be found by the Rubin Observatory in the near future, this is just the beginning of many exciting discoveries yet to come.”

The study uses data collected over the course of about 10 hours across seven nights in April and May 2025, during Rubin Observatory’s early commissioning phase. That same data revealed thousands of asteroids cruising about our solar system, about 1,900 of which have been confirmed as never-before-seen. Within that flurry, Greenstreet’s team at the UW discovered 19 quickly rotating asteroids, including the record-breaking asteroid dubbed 2025 MN45.

As asteroids orbit the sun, they also rotate at a wide range of speeds. These spin rates not only offer clues about the conditions of their formation billions of years ago, but also tell us about their internal composition and evolution over their lifetimes. In particular, an asteroid spinning quickly may have been sped up by a past collision with another asteroid, suggesting that it could be a fragment of an originally larger object.

Fast rotation also requires an asteroid to have enough internal strength to not fly apart into many smaller pieces, called fragmentation. Most asteroids are “rubble piles,” which means they are made of many smaller pieces of rock held together by gravity, and thus have limits based on their densities as to how fast they can spin without breaking apart.��

“Clearly, this asteroid must be made of material that has very high strength in order to keep it in one piece as it spins so rapidly,” Greenstreet said. “We calculate that it would need a cohesive strength similar to that of solid rock, which is quite unusual.”��

Most fast rotators discovered so far orbit the sun just beyond Earth, known as near-Earth objects. Scientists find fewer fast-rotating main-belt asteroids, which orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter, because their greater distance from Earth makes them fainter.

All but one of the newly identified fast-rotators, however, live in the main asteroid belt — an achievement made possible by Rubin’s enormous light-collecting power and precise measurement capabilities.

“As this study demonstrates, even in early commissioning, Rubin is successfully allowing us to study a population of relatively small, very rapidly rotating main-belt asteroids that hadn’t been reachable before,” Greenstreet said.

The discoveries of all 1,900 new asteroids, including the 19 fast rotators, were made possible by software developed by the UW . DiRAC’s software will power Rubin’s future solar system discoveries during its 10-year survey.

“These are exciting results but there’s much more to come,” said co-author Mario Jurić, a UW professor of astronomy. “In the next two years, Rubin will discover a thousand times as many asteroids as were presented here. Rubin’s data will open the window into what’s out there in our solar system, and how it all came to be.”

UW co-authors include , a doctoral student in astronomy and astrobiology; , a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy; Devanshi Singh, an undergraduate student of physics and astronomy; , a professor of astronomy; , a software engineer in astronomy; , a research associate professor of astronomy; , a graduate student of astronomy; and , who worked on this study as research scientists in astronomy; , a research scientist in astronomy; and , a senior research scientist in astronomy. A full list of co-authors is .

This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. The DiRAC Institute is supported by the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, Janet and Lloyd Frink and the Washington Research Foundation.

For more information, contact Greenstreet at sarahjg@uw.edu.

This story was adapted from a press release by .

A new era of astronomy and astrophysics began Monday when the first images captured by the NSF–DOE were released, demonstrating the extraordinary capabilities of the new telescope and the world’s largest digital camera.

Officials in Washington, D.C., unveiled large, ultra-high-definition images and videos, as well as discoveries of thousands of new asteroids. Astronomers and researchers around the world watched along at viewing parties, including at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s Planetarium.

The images offer a preview of the most comprehensive census of the solar system scientists have ever conducted, and a peek into the exponential increase in discoveries and understanding of the cosmos this new telescope will make possible.

The UW was one of the founding members of Rubin’s ambitious undertaking and will play a key role in making sense of the discoveries. UW scientists and engineers were critical in advocating for the project, designing the observatory and developing the software that will analyze the petabytes of data from Rubin’s telescope, including the asteroid discovery algorithms.

“����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý faculty recognized early on that dreaming big about Rubin’s capabilities and leading the scientific charge would shape our knowledge of the solar system and propel innovation in data science not only in astrophysics but also across disciplines,” said UW Provost Tricia R. Serio. “We often talk about the impact the UW is making here and around the world. This project will take us far into space and give us information about the very origins of the universe and set the stage for future discoveries we can’t even imagine today.”

From its peak in the Chilean Andes, Rubin’s Simonyi Survey Telescope will scan the sky with its 8.4-meter mirror and enormous 3,200-megapixel camera, the largest digital camera in the world. The telescope’s sight path, the pace and frequency of observations and the vast field of vision required a new type of discovery algorithm to reliably make sense of the troves of data collected. Scientists and researchers at the UW worked across disciplines to evolve data science and computer science to meet Rubin’s demands.

In 2017, the UW — with founding support from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences — established the , or DiRAC. The Institute, part of the , aims to be an interdisciplinary hub to address fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of the universe. Leaders recognized that the future of astrophysics relied on using software as the chief instrument for this exploration. Combined with the UW’s and the deep connections to the Pacific Northwest’s tech community, DiRAC has developed a global reputation for working toward new discoveries.

As the Rubin sets out on a 10-year mission to conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), software created at the UW will be pivotal as scientists advance understanding of the cosmos and the origins of the solar system. UW’s faculty, students and staff have played key roles in the construction of this new facility They’ve also been pivotal in developing the algorithms that keep the telescope image sharp and creating the codes for mapping the solar system and discovering the most energetic and rarest phenomena in what astrophysicists call the ” UW’s , a professor of astronomy, is the director of the federally-funded Rubin Construction Project.��

Unlike other telescopes — which tend to focus and “zoom in” on a few objects of interest — Rubin is alone in the capability to quickly and repeatedly map the entire visible sky.��

“Rubin has the unprecedented capacity to capture the cosmos,” said , a professor of astronomy and director of UW’s . He’s also the co-principal investigator of the supported LSST Interdisciplinary Network for Collaboration and Computing (LINCC) Frameworks program to develop state-of-the-art analysis techniques capable of meeting Rubin’s scale and complexity.

“Rubin will deliver the largest map the universe ever made: tens of billions of galaxies, billions of stars and millions of new small bodies in our own solar system. It’s a data analysis endeavor of epic proportions,” Connolly said.��

For each object Rubin observes, there will be much more than a static image, the technology will produce a thousand-frame movie: trillions of measurements of billions of objects, said , a research associate professor and the science lead of Rubin’s time-domain software team.

“With these data, scientists will better understand the universe, chronicle its evolution, and delve into science ranging from dangerous asteroids to the mysteries of dark energy,” Bellm said.

For example, the UW’s team helped create simulation software to predict Rubin’s discoveries. The research found that the telescope will map more than 5 million main-belt asteroids, 127,000 near-Earth objects, 109,000 Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit, 37,000 trans-Neptunian objects and about 2,000 Centaurs, or orbit-crossing objects.��

These objects, revealed in color and in more detail than was previously possible, help tell the story of the solar system’s origins, said , a professor of astronomy and the principal investigator of UW’s Rubin team.

Juric said that Rubin will help answer some fundamental questions: How did the planets form? Is there an unknown planet hiding in the outskirts of our solar system? Did comets bring water to the Earth? Or asteroids? And are there any that could still collide with us today?

“The first look we share today is a glimpse into the transformational capacity Rubin will bring to answer questions like these,” Juric said.

The work to support the Rubin Observatory hasn’t been limited to UW faculty. Numerous UW undergraduate and doctoral students have played contributing roles, authoring important journal articles, developing simulation software and writing complex computer codes.��

Exposure to the LSST has helped prepare students to succeed post graduation, whether applying for work in industry or moving onto advanced academic degrees.

“Developing cloud-based analytics platforms, or building pipelines to process large amounts of imaging data, are skills that allow one to do not just cutting-edge astronomy but also any other data-intensive problem,” said Steven Stetzler, who recently completed doctoral work at UW and now holds a postdoctoral appointment at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For more information, contact Juric at mjuric@uw.edu or James Davenport at jrad@uw.edu.��

A group of astronomers from across the globe, including a team from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and led by Queen’s University Belfast, have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects will be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this year.����

The NSF–DOE is set to revolutionize our knowledge of the solar system’s “small bodies” — asteroids, comets and other minor planets.��

The Rubin Observatory, under construction on the Cerro Pachón ridge in northern Chile, features the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope with a unique three-mirror design capable of surveying the entire visible sky every few nights. At its heart is the world’s largest digital camera — the 3.2 gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera — covering a 9.6 square-degree field of view with six filters, roughly 45 times the area of the full moon. Together, this “wide-fast-deep” system will generate 20 terabytes of data every night — creating an unprecedented time-lapse “movie” of the cosmos over the next 10 years, and an incredibly powerful dataset with which to map the solar system.

The team of astronomers, led by Queen’s University’s , created , an innovative new open-source software used to predict what discoveries are likely to be made. Sorcha is the first end-to-end simulator that ingests Rubin’s planned observing schedule. It applies assumptions on how Rubin Observatory sees and detects astronomical sources in its images with the best model of what the solar system and its small body reservoirs look like today. ��

“Accurate simulation software like Sorcha is critical,” said Schwamb, a reader in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University. “It tells us what Rubin will discover and lets us know how to interpret it. Our knowledge of what objects fill Earth’s solar system is about to expand exponentially and rapidly.”��

In addition to the eight major planets, the solar system is home to a vast population of small bodies that formed alongside the planets more than 4.5 billion years ago. Many of these smaller bodies remain essentially unchanged since the solar system’s birth, acting as a fossil record of its earliest days. By studying their orbits, sizes and compositions, astronomers can reconstruct how planets formed, migrated and evolved.

These objects — numbering in the tens of millions -— provide a powerful window into processes such as the delivery of water and organic material to Earth, the reshaping of planetary orbits by giant planets and the ongoing risk posed by those whose paths bring them near our planet.

In addition to Queen’s University and the UW, the international team includes researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.��

A series of papers describing the software and the predictions have been accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal and are .��

Beyond just finding these new small bodies, Rubin Observatory will observe them multiple times using different optical filters, revealing their surface colors. Past solar system surveys typically observed with a single filter.����

��“With the LSST catalog of solar system objects, our work shows that it will be like going from black-and-white television to brilliant color,” said , a doctoral student at Queen’s University. “It’s very exciting – we expect that millions of new solar system objects will be detected and most of these will be picked up in the first few years of sky survey.”��

The team’s simulations show that Rubin will map:��

• 127,000 near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets whose orbits cross or approach Earth. That’s more than tripling today’s known objects, about 38,000, and detecting more than 70% of potentially hazardous bodies larger than 140 meters. This will cut the risk of undetected asteroid impact of catastrophic proportions by at least two times, making a tremendous contribution to planetary defense.��
• Over 5 million main-belt asteroids, up from about 1.4 million, with precise color and rotation data on roughly one in three asteroids within the survey’s first years. This will give scientists unprecedented insight into the characteristics and history of the solar system’s building blocks.
• 109,000 Jupiter Trojans, bodies sharing Jupiter’s orbit at stable “Lagrange” points —�� more than seven times the number cataloged today. These bodies represent some of the most pristine material dating all the way back to the formation of the planets.��
• 37,000 trans-Neptunian objects, residents of the distant Kuiper Belt — nearly 10 times the current census — shedding light on Neptune’s past migration and the outer solar system’s history.��
• Approximately 1,500-2,000 , bodies on short-lived giant planet-crossing orbits in the middle solar system. Most Centaurs will eventually be ejected from the solar system, but a few lucky ones will survive to become short-period comets. The LSST will provide the first detailed view of the Centaurs and the important transition stage from Centaur to comet. �į��

Rubin Observatory’s LSST is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fill in the missing pieces of our solar system, said , a member of the Sorcha team and a UW professor of Astronomy. Juric also is a team lead of Rubin’s Solar System Processing Pipelines and a director of UW’s .��

“Our simulations predict that Rubin will expand known small-body populations by factors of 4–9x, delivering an unprecedented trove of orbits, colors and light curves,” Juric said. “With this data, we’ll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot — and potentially deflect — the asteroids that could threaten Earth.”��

It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids, and researchers found that Rubin will double that number in less than a year, said , a doctoral student at the UW.��

“Rubin’s unparalleled combination of breadth and depth make it a uniquely effective discovery machine,” Kurlander said.

, an assistant professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign added: “Only by debiasing LSST’s complex observing pattern can we turn raw detections into a true reflection of the solar system’s history — where the planets formed, and how they migrated over billions of years. Sorcha is a game changer in that respect.”

The Sorcha code is open-source and . By making these resources available, the Sorcha team has enabled researchers worldwide to refine their tools and be ready for the flood of LSST data that Rubin will generate, advancing the understanding of the small bodies that illuminate the solar system like never before.��

Rubin Observatory is event on June 23, offering the world an early glimpse of the survey’s power. Full science operations are slated to begin later this year.��

For more information, contact Juric at mjuric@uw.edu, Kurlander at jkurla@uw.edu, Schwamb at m.schwamb@qub.ac.uk, and Murtagh at jmurtagh05@qub.ac.uk.

An asteroid discovery algorithm — designed to uncover near-Earth asteroids for the ’s upcoming 10-year survey of the night sky — has identified its first “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term for space rocks in Earth’s vicinity that scientists like to keep an eye on. The roughly 600-foot-long asteroid, designated , was discovered during a test drive of the algorithm with the survey in Hawaii. Finding 2022 SF289, which poses no risk to Earth for the foreseeable future, confirms that the next-generation algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D, can identify near-Earth asteroids with fewer and more dispersed observations than required by today’s methods.

“By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said Rubin scientist , the principal developer of HelioLinc3D and a researcher at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

The solar system is home to tens of millions of rocky bodies ranging from small asteroids not larger than a few feet, to dwarf planets the size of our moon. These objects remain from an era over four billion years ago, when the planets in our system formed and took their present-day positions.

Most of these bodies are distant, but a number orbit close to the Earth, and are known as near-Earth objects, or NEOs. The closest of these — those with a trajectory that takes them within about 5 million miles of Earth’s orbit, or about 20 times the distance from Earth to the moon — warrant special attention. Such “potentially hazardous asteroids,” or PHAs, are systematically searched for and monitored to ensure they won’t collide with Earth, a potentially devastating event.

Scientists search for PHAs using specialized telescope systems like the NASA-funded ATLAS survey, run by a team at the University of Hawaii’s . They do so by taking images of parts of the sky at least four times every night. A discovery is made when they notice a point of light moving unambiguously in a straight line over the image series. Scientists have discovered about 2,350 PHAs using this method, but estimate that at least as many more await discovery.

From its peak in the Chilean Andes, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is set to join the hunt for these objects in early 2025. Funded primarily by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Rubin’s observations will dramatically increase the discovery rate of PHAs. Rubin will scan the sky unprecedentedly quickly with its 8.4-meter mirror and massive 3,200-megapixel camera, visiting spots on the sky twice per night rather than the four times needed by present telescopes. But with this novel observing “cadence,” researchers need a new type of discovery algorithm to reliably spot space rocks.

Rubin’s solar system software team at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s has been working to just develop such codes. Working with Smithsonian senior astrophysicist and Harvard University lecturer , who in 2018 pioneered a new class of heliocentric asteroid search algorithms, Heinze and , a former ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researcher who is now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed HelioLinc3D: a code that could find asteroids in Rubin’s dataset. With Rubin still under construction, Heinze and Eggl wanted to test HelioLinc3D to see if it could discover a new asteroid in existing data, one with too few observations to be discovered by today’s conventional algorithms.

and , lead ATLAS astronomers, offered their data for a test. The Rubin team set HelioLinc3D to search through this data and on July 18, 2023 it spotted its first PHA: 2022 SF289, initially imaged by ATLAS on September 19, 2022 at a distance of 13 million miles from Earth.

In retrospect, ATLAS had observed 2022 SF289 three times on four separate nights, but never the requisite four times on one night to be identified as a new NEO. But these are just the occasions where HelioLinc3D excels: It successfully combined fragments of data from all four nights and made the discovery.

“Any survey will have difficulty discovering objects like 2022 SF289 that are near its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said Denneau. “This in effect gives us a ‘bigger, better’ telescope.”

Other surveys had also missed 2022 SF289, because it was passing in front of the rich starfields of the Milky Way. But by now knowing where to look, additional observations from Pan-STARRS and Catalina Sky Survey quickly confirmed the discovery. The team used B612 Asteroid Institute’s to recover further unrecognized observations by the NSF-supported Zwicky Transient Facility telescope.

2022 SF289 is classified as an -type NEO. Its closest approach brings it within 140,000 miles of Earth’s orbit, closer than the moon. Its diameter of 600ft is large enough to be classified as “potentially hazardous.” But despite its proximity, projections indicate that it poses no danger of hitting Earth for the foreseeable future. Its discovery has been announced in the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Electronic Circular .

Currently, scientists know of 2,350 PHAs but expect there are more than 3,000 yet to be found.

“This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night,” said Rubin scientist Mario Jurić, director of the DiRAC Institute, professor of astronomy at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and leader of the team behind HelioLinc3D.�� “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large, telescopes.”

Financial support for Rubin Observatory comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and private funding raised by the LSST Corporation.

For more information, contact Heinze at aheinze@uw.edu and Jurić at mjuric@uw.edu.

A novel algorithm developed by ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers to discover asteroids in the solar system has proved its mettle. The first candidate asteroids identified by the algorithm — known as Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or — have been confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s .

The Asteroid Institute, a program of , has been running THOR on its cloud-based astrodynamics platform — Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping, or ADAM — to identify and track asteroids. With confirmation of these new asteroids by the Minor Planet Center and their addition to its registry, researchers using the Asteroid Institute’s resources can submit thousands of additional new discoveries.

“A comprehensive map of the solar system gives astronomers critical insights both for science and planetary defense,” said Matthew Holman, dynamicist and search algorithm expert at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the former director of the Minor Planet Center. “Tracklet-less algorithms such as THOR greatly expand the kinds of datasets astronomers can use in building such a map.”

THOR was co-created by , a UW associate professor of astronomy and director of the UW’s , and , a UW graduate student in astronomy. They and their UW collaborators unveiled THOR in a published last year in The Astronomical Journal. It links points of light in different sky images that are consistent with asteroid orbits. Unlike current state-of-the-art codes, THOR does not require the telescope to observe the sky in a particular pattern for asteroids to be discoverable.

The Asteroid Institute’s ADAM platform is an that runs astrodynamics algorithms at large scale using Google Cloud, in particular the scalable computational and storage capabilities in Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage and Google Kubernetes Engine.

“The work of the Asteroid Institute is critical because astronomers are reaching the limits of what’s discoverable with current techniques and telescopes,” said Jurić, who is also a senior data science fellow with the UW . “Our team is pleased to work alongside the Asteroid Institute to enable mapping of the solar system using Google Cloud.”

Researchers can now begin systematic explorations of large datasets that were previously not usable for discovering asteroids. THOR recognizes asteroids and, most importantly, calculates their orbits well enough to be recognized by the Minor Planet Center as tracked asteroids.

Moeyens searched a 30-day window of images from the NOIRLab Source Catalog, a collection of nearly 68 billion observations taken by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory telescopes between 2012 and 2019, and submitted a small initial subset of discoveries to the Minor Planet Center for official recognition and validation. Now that the computational discovery technique has been validated, thousands of new discoveries from the catalog and other datasets are expected to follow.

“Discovering and tracking asteroids is crucial to understanding our solar system, enabling development of space and protecting our planet from asteroid impacts,” said Ed Lu, executive director of the Asteroid Institute. “With THOR running on ADAM, any telescope with an archive can now become an asteroid search telescope. We are using the power of massive computation to enable not only more discoveries from existing telescopes, but also to find and track asteroids in historical images of the sky that had gone previously unnoticed because they were never intended for asteroid searches.”

The B612 Foundation recently to advance these efforts.

The collaborative efforts of Google Cloud, B612’s Asteroid Institute and the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s DiRAC Institute make this work possible.

For more information, contact Jurić at mjuric@uw.edu and Moeyens at moeyensj@uw.edu.

Adapted from a e by the B612 Foundation.

The National Science Foundation awarded the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and nine collaborating organizations, including the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, $2.8 million for a two-year “conceptualization phase” of the .

SCIMMA’s goal is to develop algorithms, databases and computing and networking cyberinfrastructure to help scientists interpret multi-messenger observations. Multi-messenger astrophysics combines observations of light, gravitational waves and particles to understand some of the most extreme events in the universe. For example, the observation of both gravitational waves and light from the collision of two neutron stars in 2017 helped explain the origin of heavy elements, allowed an independent measurement of the expansion of the universe and confirmed the association between neutron-star mergers and gamma-ray bursts.

The institute would facilitate global collaborations, thus transcending the capabilities of any single existing institution or team. It is directed by Patrick Brady, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and director of the Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics. One of three co-principal investigators on the project is , a UW associate professor of astronomy and senior data science fellow at the UW eScience Institute.

As part of SCIMMA, UW researchers will work to develop a “transient alert” system that will alert researchers around the world about cosmic events picked up, for example, by astronomical observatories.

“These events could include phenomena like collisions between black holes and neutron stars detected via gravitational waves, exploding supernovae detected by neutrino emissions, and other energetic phenomena detected in visible wavelengths of light,” said Jurić, who is also a faculty member with the UW . “UW researchers have demonstrated these technologies as part of the project, where the UW-built ZTF Alert Distribution System transmitted more than 100 million alerts over the past two years.”

UW researchers will also help develop a prototype remote analysis platform, which will allow scientists to analyze archived multi-messenger astrophysics using future resources provided by SCIMMA, said Jurić.

SCIMMA’s two-year conceptualization phase began Sept. 1. Among its goals are enabling seamless co-analysis of disparate datasets by supporting the interoperability of software and data services. In addition, over the next two years SCIMMA will develop education and training curricula designed to enhance the STEM workforce, according to an announcement by the NSF.

“Multi-messenger astrophysics is a data-intensive science in its infancy that is already transforming our understanding of the universe,” said Brady. “The promise of multi-messenger astrophysics, however, can be realized only if sufficient cyberinfrastructure is available to rapidly handle, combine and analyze the very large-scale distributed data from all types of astronomical measurements. The conceptualization phase of SCIMMA will balance rapid prototyping, novel algorithm development and software sustainability to accelerate scientific discovery over the next decade and more.”

Additional project collaborators include Columbia University; the Center for Advanced Computing and Department of Astronomy at Cornell University; Las Cumbres Observatory, a California-based network of observatories; Michigan State University; Pennsylvania State University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

For more information, contact Jurić at mjuric@astro.washington.edu.

Adapted from a release by the National Science Foundation.

The first astronomers had a limited toolkit: their eyes. They could only observe those stars, planets and celestial events bright enough to pick up unassisted. But today’s astronomers use increasingly sensitive and sophisticated instruments to view and track a bevy of cosmic wonders, including objects and events that were too dim or distant for their sky-gazing forebears.

On Nov. 14, scientists with the California Institute of Technology, the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and eight additional partner institutions, that the , the latest sensitive tool for astrophysical observations in the Northern Hemisphere, has seen “” and took its first detailed image of the night sky.

When fully operational in 2018, the ZTF will scan almost the entire northern sky every night. Based at the Palomar Observatory in southern California and operated by Caltech, the ZTF’s goal is to use these nightly images to identify “transient” objects that vary between observations — identifying events ranging from supernovae millions of light years away to near-Earth asteroids.

In 2016, the UW Department of Astronomy formally joined the ZTF team and will help develop new methods to identify the most “interesting” of the millions of changes in the sky — including new objects — that the ZTF will detect each night and alert scientists. That way, these high-priority transient objects can be followed up in detail by larger telescopes, including the UW’s share of the 3.5-meter telescope.

“UW is a world leader in survey astronomy, and joining the ZTF will deepen our ability to perform cutting-edge science on the ZTF’s massive, real-time data stream,” said , a UW assistant professor of astronomy and the ZTF’s survey scientist. “One of the strengths of the ZTF is its global collaboration, consisting of experts in the field of time-domain astronomy from institutions around the world.”

Identifying, cataloguing and classifying these celestial objects will impact studies of stars, our solar system and the evolution of our universe. The ZTF could also help detect electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources discovered by Advanced LIGO and Virgo, as other observatories did in August when these detectors picked up gravitational waves from .

But to unlock this promise, the ZTF requires massive data collection and real-time analysis — and UW astronomers have a history of meeting such “big data” challenges.

The roots of big data astronomy at the UW stretch back to the , which used a telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to gather precise data on the “redshift” — or increasing wavelength — of galaxies as they move away from each other in the expanding universe.�� Once properly analyzed, the data helped astronomers create a more accurate 3-D “map” of the observable universe. The UW’s survey astronomy group is gathered within the , which includes scientists in the Department of Astronomy as well as the eScience Institute and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

“It was natural for the UW astronomy department to join the ZTF team, because we have assembled a dedicated team and expertise for ‘big data’ astronomy, and we have much to learn from ZTF’s partnerships and potential discoveries,” said UW associate professor of astronomy .

From Earth, the sky is essentially a giant sphere surrounding our planet. That whole sphere has an area of more than 40,000 square degrees. The ZTF utilizes a new high-resolution camera mounted on the Palomar Observatory’s existing Samuel Oschin 48-inch Schmidt Telescope. Together these instruments make up the duet that saw first light recently, and after months of fine-tuning they will be able to capture images of 3,750 square degrees each hour.

These images will be an order of magnitude more numerous than those produced by the ZTF’s predecessor survey at Palomar. But since these transient objects might fade or change position in the sky, analysis tools must run in near real time as images come in.

“We’ll be looking for anything subtle that changes over time,” said Bellm. “And given how much of the sky ZTF will image each night, that could be tens of thousands of objects of potential interest identified every few days.”

From a data analysis standpoint, these are no easy tasks. But, they’re precisely the sorts of tasks that UW astronomers have been working on in preparation for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is expected to see first light in the next decade. The LSST, located in northern Chile, is another big data project in astrophysics, and is expected to capture images of almost the entire night sky every few days.

“Data from the ZTF surveys will impact nearly all fields of astrophysics, as well as prepare us for the LSST down the line,” said Juric.

The ZTF is funded by the National Science Foundation and its partner institutions. The UW’s participation with the ZTF was made possible by funds provided by the College of Arts & Science, the DIRAC Institute and the Washington Research Foundation. The DIRAC Institute is funded in part by the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences.

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For more information, contact Bellm at ecbellm@uw.edu and Juric at mjuric@astro.washington.edu.