Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2023
18 ASTRO PUBLISHING tectable. But with the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), conducted with Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, scientists are expecting an explosive period of dis- covery as these faint objects come into view for the first time. Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of En- ergy (DOE). Rubin is a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, which, along with SLAC National Accelerator Labora- tory, will operate Rubin. The origins of our Solar System lay in a massive swirling cloud of gas and dust that col- lapsed to form new stars, one of which was our Sun. The stars gobbled up most of the cosmic ingredients, but around each star the remainder formed the small building blocks of planets — called planetesimals — ranging from tens of meters to a few kilo- meters in size. Some of these coa- lesced into planets and their moons and rings, but trillions of leftover planetesimals continued to orbit their host stars. by NOIRLab Charles Blue and Manuel Gnida W e’ve learned a lot about the biggest, brightest ob- jects in our Solar System using existing instruments and tele- scopes. However, astronomers like Michele Bannister, Rutherford Dis- covery Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand and member of the Rubin Observatory/LSST Solar System Sci- ence Collaboration, want to search deeper, for small, faint bodies that originated in planetary systems far beyond our own. These interstellar objects — which were flung from their home systems into the space between stars — are so faint that they have been virtually unde- NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2023 Rubin observatory will detect visitors from distant stars
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