Combined images from the observatory show the Trifid nebula and the Lagoon nebula - NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The world’s largest digital camera telescope has discovered 2,000 new asteroids, including seven potentially hazardous space rocks that will pass close to Earth.

The Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile released the first images from its 3,200 megapixel camera, which produces images so large they are impossible to see in detail with the human eye.

In the first few days of sky scanning, the telescope spotted 2,104 unknown asteroids, including a handful of “near-earth objects” (NEOs) which will pass within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit.

Scientists currently know of around one million asteroids, but the observatory expects to find another five million in the next few years, including tens of thousands of NEOs.

‘Seven near-earth objects’

Zeljko Ivezic, the deputy director of the observatory, said: “There are so many of them, just in a few nights of data, and in just one tiny region.

“We have 2,000 in this few nights of data, and there are seven near-earth objects that have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit. None of them is in a position to strike Earth, don’t worry.

“We’ll get tens of thousands more near-earth objects and will discover about five million new asteroids during the next few years. This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered in the last 200 years, since the discovery of the first asteroid.

“So because of this rapid development of technology today, we can outdo all these two centuries of effort in just a couple of years.”

Scientists observe the first images of deep space captured by the world’s biggest telescope - RODRIGO ARANGUA/AFP

In January the European Space Agency Planetary Defence Office announced that asteroid 2024 YR4 had a small chance of impacting Earth in 2032. The estimate has since been downgraded, but it may still hit the Moon.

The observatory is expected to detect 90 per cent of all potentially hazardous asteroids over 460 feet wide, and is likely to solve the mystery of Planet Nine, which astronomers believe may be lurking in the depths of our solar system.

The Rubin Observatory also released a striking mosaic of the glowing pink Trifid and Lagoon nebulae in the Sagittarius constellation where new stars are forming in huge clouds of gas and dust.

An image of the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 49, usually seen as a bright spot on a dark background, revealed a sky teeming with brightly coloured stars and galaxies.

Demystify dark matter

The new images show how galaxies cluster together, and experts are hoping the unprecedented detail will help uncover the secrets of dark matter and dark energy – the two most mysterious forces in the universe.

The observatory is named after Vera Rubin, the American astrophysicist who calculated that galaxies must contain about ten times as much “dark” mass, otherwise they would fly apart.

She proposed that at least ninety percent of the mass in the universe is invisible and unidentified.

An image from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory shows a small section of the Virgo cluster

The observatory, which has been described as the ‘greatest astronomical discovery machine ever built’ is located in the Andes on the top of Cerro Pachón in Chile and has taken two decades to build.

Its main goal is to produce a huge, ultra-high-definition movie of the universe by scanning the whole sky over 10 years, called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

The digital camera in the telescope is so big that it would need 400 high-definition television screens to display a single image.

When complete, the full survey is expected to rack up 500 petabytes of data – the same storage as half-a-million 4K Hollywood films.

Britain to process 1.5m images

Prof Hiranya Peiris from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, part of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, said: “We will be looking at the universe in a way that we have never done before, and this exploration is bound to throw up surprises that we never imagined.”

Britain will also host one of three international data facilities which will process around 1.5 million images, capturing around 10 billion stars and galaxies.

Prof Bob Mann, the LSST:UK Project Leader from the University of Edinburgh, said: “UK researchers have been contributing to the scientific and technical preparation for the Rubin LSST for more than ten years.

“These exciting First Look images show that everything is working well and reassure us that we have a decade’s worth of wonderful data coming our way, with which UK astronomers will do great science.”

Prof Vasily Belokurov from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy added: “A new era of galactic archaeology is beginning.”

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