Asteroids, Comets and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. LSST@Europe7 Open Lecture

Описание: We are very pleased to invite You to participate in Open Lecture entitled "Asteroids, Comets and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time: Unlocking the secrets of the Solar System with Survey Astronomy". This lecture will be presented to You by Dr James Robinson from Institute for Astronomy, The University of Edinburgh, UK.

By the end of 2025 the 10 year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will have begun. Every night the world's largest astronomical camera will scan the sky searching for anything that has changed. As a result LSST will discover huge numbers of moving objects, asteroids and comets, discovering millions of objects over the 10 years of the survey.

These discoveries will greatly improve our knowledge of how the Solar System formed and evolved, and how Earth acquired the conditions to host life. The Solar System formed alongside the birth of the Sun in a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. In the primordial disk the dusty solids combined to form planetesimals, some of which went on to grow rapidly into planets. The asteroids and comets that we observe today are the small bodies of rock and ice which remain after the planets formed. Astronomical surveys such as the LSST provide us with data of where these bodies are located and what they are made of, which allows us to constrain theories of how and where the planets formed, and how they ended up at their current locations. Furthermore, LSST will inevitably discover asteroids in the vicinity of Earth that may one day impact us. These observations will therefore provide a rapid warning system for the purposes of planetary defence.

Preliminary data from Rubin has been released and there has already been extremely interesting results, most notably the characterisation of the recent interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS. Beyond a doubt LSST will be one of the greatest sources of exciting new Solar System science for the next decade.

This event is a part of the LSST@Europe7 Conference, which will take place in Poznań, Poland, from September 15 to 19, 2025.