内容来源：https://www.quantamagazine.org/rubin-tracks-skyscraper-size-asteroids-failed-supernovas-and-interstellar-visitors-20260515/

内容总结：

标题：鲁宾天文台开启宇宙“延时电影”时代：首年预计发现百万新小行星，捕捉超高速旋转天体与星际来客

位于智利阿塔卡马沙漠山巅的薇拉·C·鲁宾天文台近日发布首批观测数据，标志着这座筹备三十余年的巨型天文设施正式进入科学运行阶段。作为全球首台专为动态宇宙观测设计的望远镜，鲁宾将每数天完成一次南半球全天空扫描，在未来十年间构建一部前所未有的宇宙“延时电影”。

首年成果预览：发现数量超越人类两百年总和

仅运行首年，科学家预计鲁宾将发现100万颗未被记录的小行星——这一数字追平了过去两百年人类发现的小行星总数。同时还将发现数千颗彗星、数十亿颗恒星与星系。“天文学从未有过如此爆发式的发现浪潮，”美国国家光学红外天文研究实验室天文学家莎拉·格林斯特里特表示。

该天文台配备直径8.4米的主镜及汽车般大小的全球最大数码相机。尽管目前仍处于调试阶段，图像尚未达到最佳清晰度，但科学家已在首批数据中取得多项突破。

超速自转小行星挑战现有理论

2025年6月，鲁宾发布的“初光”图像中发现了1500颗新小行星。其中19颗被确认以超高速自转，最快的一颗编号2025 MN45的小行星直径约700米（近两倍帝国大厦高度），每1.88分钟完成一次自转。此前发现的同尺寸小行星自转周期均超过10分钟。

“这个尺寸的小行星通常被认为是碎石堆结构，但2025 MN45必须拥有更致密的固态内核，否则高速自转会使它解体，”论文第一作者格林斯特里特分析称。这颗天体可能是早期太阳系行星核心的碎片，在45亿年前的碰撞后进入太空疯狂旋转。

预警系统成功测试：可提前数天预警小行星撞击

2026年2月，鲁宾首次测试自动预警系统，单夜即发出80万条天体变化警报。正式运行后，预计每晚将产生700万条警报和20TB数据。科学家模拟显示，鲁宾可比现有望远镜提前数天发现数米级的“迫近撞击者”，为公众观测火流星及收集陨石提供充足预警时间。

超新星研究：有望破解宇宙膨胀之谜

鲁宾每年可发现25万颗Ia型超新星，远超1990年代末促成暗能量发现时所用的百颗样本。牛津大学科学家斯蒂芬·斯马特指出，海量数据将助力解决“哈勃常数危机”，即早期宇宙膨胀速度与近期观测不符的谜题。鲁宾还能探测到其他巡天无法发现的“失败超新星”——恒星直接坍缩而非爆炸的罕见现象，其灵敏度比现有巡天高出100倍。

星际来客追踪：已提前10天捕捉到闯入者

2025年7月，科学家通过ATLAS系统发现星际彗星3I/ATLAS。后续查阅鲁宾数据发现，该天文台早在10天前就已捕捉到这颗天外来客。预计鲁宾在整个运行期间将发现5至500颗来自其他恒星系的星际小天体。“如果一颗都没发现，那将是一个非常有趣的问题，”芬兰赫尔辛基大学天体物理学家罗斯玛丽·多西表示。

绘制宇宙三维地图：20亿个星系待测量

通过光度红移技术，鲁宾将为所发现的200亿个星系中约40亿个测量距离。这将帮助科学家研究暗能量、暗物质分布，并精确定位快速射电暴（FRB）的宿主星系，探究其与磁星的神秘关联。

“鲁宾每晚产生的海量数据，会让所有人穷于应对——但这正是天文学家梦寐以求的‘甜蜜负担’，”科廷大学天文学家迈克尔·弗雷泽表示。随着鲁宾天文台正式投入全面巡天，天文学的一个全新时代已然拉开序幕。

中文翻译：

鲁宾天文台追踪摩天大楼般的小行星、失败的超新星与星际访客
引言
多年来，人们对位于智利阿塔卡马沙漠山脉中维拉·C·鲁宾天文台开启观测的期待与日俱增。鲁宾天文台最初于20世纪90年代中期被构想为"暗物质望远镜"，其设计目标是以前所未有的精细程度，研究我们不断运动与变化的宇宙。在十年间，每隔几天，鲁宾天文台就会拍摄南半球整个夜空的图像，制作出世界上规模最大的延时电影。

仅在鲁宾天文台运行的第一年，科学家预计就能发现100万颗未被记录的小行星——数量相当于人类过去200年间记载的小行星总和——以及数千颗彗星、数十亿颗恒星和星系。

"在天文学领域，我们从未经历过这样的发现大爆发。"国家光学-红外天文研究实验室的天文学家莎拉·格林斯特里特说。

在鲁宾天文台位于塞罗帕琼山顶的台址奠基十多年后，这座天文台如今已成为现实。它配备了一台拥有三面镜子的望远镜，其中最大的镜面直径达8.4米，以及一台汽车大小的数码相机——这是地球上最大的此类相机。它已开始收集初步图像。

"我们真的从鲁宾收到数据了，这感觉几乎不真实。"北爱尔兰贝尔法斯特女王大学的天体物理学家马特·尼科尔说，"看到有新发现被发掘出来，简直是梦想成真。"

天文学家们正在仔细研究这些初始数据，并对他们的发现感到欣喜：快速旋转的小行星；数量众多的爆炸恒星；甚至还有难得一见的来自另一个太阳系的天体掠过。"它真的没有辜负大家的期望。"澳大利亚科廷大学的天文学家迈克尔·弗雷泽说。

旋转的小行星
随着天文台进行最后的调试，鲁宾拍摄的图像尚未达到科学家预期的清晰度。但某些鲁宾的科学任务对图像质量的依赖程度较低，包括对小行星和彗星的搜索。这意味着，即使在迄今为止拍摄的图像中，天文学家也已经能够有所发现。

2025年6月，鲁宾天文台发布了一组在"第一缕光"期间拍摄的图像，其中包括1500颗新小行星的照片。今年1月，研究人员宣布，其中19颗小行星的旋转速度异常快。这些"超高速旋转体"中转速最快的是一颗名为2025 MN45的小行星，其直径几乎是帝国大厦高度的两倍，每1.88分钟就完成一次自转。

虽然科学家也曾发现过旋转更快的小行星，但它们往往要小得多——直径在10米到几百米之间。对于2025 MN45这样大小的小行星（平均直径约700米，约合2300英尺），"我们原本没预料到会发现（自转）快于10分钟的天体。"华盛顿大学的德米特里·瓦维洛夫说，他是该发现论文的合著者之一。

大多数这种尺寸的小行星被认为是碎石堆，即由重力松散地聚集在一起的岩石混合物。但2025 MN45必定拥有更坚固的结构；否则，其自身的旋转就会将它撕裂。该论文的第一作者格林斯特里特说，它可能是早期太阳系中一个早已消亡的行星内核被撞碎后的碎片，在过去的45亿年里脱离束缚，在太空中疯狂旋转。

鲁宾天文台发现的海量小行星，可能有助于科学家拼凑出太阳系的历史。天文学家认为，行星在最初形成时彼此距离更近，但随着时间的推移，它们迁移到了现在的轨道上。格林斯特里特说，发现某些运动模式（例如与海王星轨道同步）的小行星，可以帮助我们追溯这种迁移过程。

科学家们还希望鲁宾能极大地提升发现那些直径仅数米、即将撞击地球的小型小行星的能力。这些被称为"近地撞击体"的小行星大多会在地球大气层中烧毁，在空中产生耀眼的火球。

最近的模拟显示，鲁宾每年大约能发现一个这样的天体。更重要的是，"它应该能提前几天发现它们，而不是像现在的望远镜那样只提前几个小时。"领导这项模拟工作的弗雷泽说。这可以为天文学家争取足够的时间，前往撞击地点观测撞击过程，或者搜寻任何坠落地面的陨石。"我们可以派人出去，部署大量传感器，从相机到次声波探测器，应有尽有。"他说。

此外，还可以向公众发布事件预警，让他们有机会观看天空中的闪光。"我们可以告诉大家到外面去看，因为我们知道将会有一颗美丽的火球出现。"弗雷泽说。

超新星群
鲁宾天文台将用第一年时间绘制一幅夜空基准图，科学家会将后续图像与这幅模板进行比对。当自动警报系统发现变化（例如恒星爆炸或小行星飞过）时，就会向科学家发出提示。

2026年2月24日，鲁宾首次测试了其警报系统。通过拍摄一处此前巡天项目已构建了足够模板的天空区域，鲁宾在一个晚上就发出了80万条警报。

"所有发生变化、出现或消失的天体都被编目并触发了警报。"牛津大学的斯蒂芬·斯马特说。斯马特是Lasair数据平台的科学负责人，该平台是七个数据中介之一，这些中介将帮助天文学家从鲁宾的海量数据中筛选发现。

今年夏天全面巡天开始后，鲁宾预计每晚将产生700万条警报和20太字节的数据。

仅举一个例子来说明这股数据洪流将如何改变我们对宇宙的理解：以超新星为例，它们是恒星耗尽能量后辉煌的死亡挣扎。早在20世纪90年代末，两个天文学家团队利用不到100颗"Ia型"超新星的观测数据，做出了一个关于我们宇宙的革命性发现：宇宙的膨胀正在加速，驱动力是一种仍属神秘的被称为暗能量的力量。一旦鲁宾全面投入运行，研究人员预计一年内将发现25万颗这样的超新星。

科学家们希望鲁宾的超新星数据能有助于解决哈勃张力问题，即早期宇宙的膨胀速度似乎比近期宇宙更快的观测现象。"我们想收集大量的Ia型超新星样本，以更详细地探测这种加速。"斯马特说。

斯马特也对寻找"失败的超新星"感兴趣，这种超新星发生在恒星向内坍缩而非向外爆炸时。矛盾的是，它们可能起源于质量最大的恒星。2026年2月，科学家在仙女座星系中锁定了一个可能的候选体。

凭借其图像的精妙细节，鲁宾非常适合发现这类事件——在这些事件中，恒星消失于爆炸中，而其亮度可能暗到其他巡天项目无法观测。"它比其他的巡天项目能探测到暗100倍的天体。"斯马特说。

远方的访客
鲁宾还可用于追踪穿过我们太阳系的有趣且不寻常的天体。传统上，捕捉这类高速旅行者非常困难，至少在没有能够快速识别出极暗天体的巡天系统的情况下是这样。科学家仅观测到过三个这样的星际天体——从其他恒星系被抛出并闯入我们邻近区域的小行星和彗星——它们让我们得以一窥其他太阳系的物质。鲁宾已经证明了自己发现它们的能力。

科学家于2025年7月1日宣布观测到一颗名为3I/ATLAS的星际彗星。他们并非通过鲁宾发现它，而是借助由另外四台望远镜组成的"小行星地球撞击最终警报系统"（ATLAS），该系统通常发现的是近邻天体。

其他天文学家随后查阅了鲁宾的初始数据，发现该天文台在10天前就已经探测到了3I/ATLAS。如果在巡天期间，类似的远方访客出现在鲁宾的数据中，天文学家将会收到警报。

科学家们无法确切知道鲁宾会发现多少个星际天体，但他们预计至少会有所发现。"可能在5到500个之间，"芬兰赫尔辛基大学的天体物理学家罗斯玛丽·多尔西说，"这取决于这些天体从其母星系中被抛出的频率。我乐观地认为会找到一些，但如果一个都没有，那将是一个非常有趣的问题。"

测量距离
天文学家确定太空中天体距离的方法之一是研究其光线。当光线穿越膨胀的宇宙向地球传播时，它会向电磁波谱的红端偏移。红移越高，表明光线被拉伸得越厉害，其光源离地球越远。

鲁宾的预览数据让科学家得以测试其通过一种称为"测光红移"的技术测量这种光线的能力，这种技术将使其能够绘制宇宙各处的星系图，以探测暗能量和暗物质。"预览数据告诉我们这些测光红移的准确度将有多高。"科廷大学的天文学家克里斯汀·达格说。达格表示，鲁宾的表现至少与其他尖端望远镜一样好，但它将测量更多星系的红移——在其将发现的200亿个星系中，大约有40亿个。

达格预计，这些数据还将帮助科学家研究快速射电暴，即天空中明亮且原因不明的无线电波闪爆，可能与大质量恒星坍缩形成黑洞有关。虽然鲁宾无法探测无线电波，但如果能将快速射电暴追溯到鲁宾能够测量的某个宿主星系，测光红移数据将帮助科学家计算出快速射电暴的距离，这有助于确定触发它们的过程。

所有这些仅仅是科学家们期望在鲁宾上线后探索的一小部分内容。随着它的启用，天文学的一个新时代即将开启。

"鲁宾将产生海量数据，每晚发出无数警报，以至于每个人都很难跟上信息的步伐。"弗雷泽说——这是一个挑战，但也是一个令人愉悦的"烦恼"。

英文来源：

Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids, Failed Supernovas, and Interstellar Visitors
Introduction
Over the years, anticipation has built for the start of observations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter Telescope, Rubin is designed to study our constantly moving and changing universe in greater detail than ever before. Once every few days for a decade, Rubin will take images of the entire night sky over the Southern Hemisphere, creating the world’s largest time-lapse movie.
In Rubin’s first year alone, scientists expect the observatory to find 1 million undiscovered asteroids — as many as have been documented in the previous 200 years of human history — as well as thousands of comets and billions of stars and galaxies.
“We’ve never had this kind of explosion of discovery within astronomy,” said Sarah Greenstreet, an astronomer at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory.
A little over a decade after the first stone was laid to build Rubin’s home on the mountaintop of Cerro Pachón, the observatory is now a reality, outfitted with a telescope with three mirrors, the largest of which measures 8.4 meters across, and a car-size digital camera, the largest on Earth. It has begun collecting preliminary images.
“It almost doesn’t feel real that we’re actually getting data from Rubin,” said Matt Nicholl, an astrophysicist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “To see stuff being found is a dream come true.”
Astronomers are poring over the initial data, and they’re pleased with what they’re finding: rapidly spinning asteroids; myriad exploding stars; and even a rare glimpse of an object passing by from another solar system. “It’s really living up to expectations,” said Michael Frazer, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia.
Spinning Asteroids
As the observatory goes through its final tuning, Rubin’s images have not yet reached the sharpness that scientists expect. But some Rubin science is less dependent on image quality, including its searches for asteroids and comets. This means that, even in the images taken so far, astronomers have been able to make discoveries.
In June 2025, Rubin released a set of images taken during its “first light,” including photographs of 1,500 new asteroids. In January, researchers announced that 19 of those asteroids were spinning especially rapidly. The quickest of these “superfast rotators,” an asteroid with a diameter almost twice the height of the Empire State Building, called 2025 MN45, completes a revolution every 1.88 minutes.
While scientists have spotted asteroids that spin faster, they’ve tended to be much smaller — between 10 and a few hundred meters. For asteroids the size of 2025 MN45, about 700 meters (2,300 feet) across on average, “we didn’t expect we would find something [spinning] faster than 10 minutes,” said Dmitrii Vavilov of the University of Washington, a co-author on the discovery paper.
Most asteroids of this size are thought to be piles of rubble, conglomerations of rock loosely held together by gravity. But 2025 MN45 must have a more solid structure; otherwise its own spin would tear it apart. It might be the fragmented chunk of a long-dead planetary core from the early solar system, broken in a collision and left to spin wildly through space for the last 4.5 billion years, said Greenstreet, the paper’s lead author.
Rubin’s vast pool of asteroids could help scientists piece together the history of our solar system. Astronomers think that the planets were much closer together when they first formed but that they have migrated over time to their current orbits. Finding asteroids in certain patterns of motion, such as an orbit in sync with Neptune’s, could help us trace this migration, Greenstreet said.
Scientists also hope that Rubin will supercharge efforts to spot small asteroids, those that are just a few meters in size, before they hit Earth. These asteroids, known as imminent impactors, mostly burn up in our atmosphere, producing brilliant fireballs in the sky.
Recent simulations show that Rubin might find about one of these a year. What’s more, “it should see them a couple of days in advance, instead of a couple of hours,” as current telescopes do, said Frazer, who led the simulation work. That could give astronomers enough time to travel to the location of the impact and watch it unfold, or to look for any meteorites that make it to the ground. “We can send people out and put a whole bunch of sensors down, from cameras to infrasound,” he said.
It will also be possible to alert members of the public to the event so they can watch the flash in the sky. “We can tell people to go look outside, because we know there’s going to be a beautiful fireball,” Frazer said.
Swarms of Supernovas
Rubin will spend its first year creating a baseline map of the night sky, and scientists will compare subsequent images to this template. An automated alert system will ping them when it comes across a change, such as an exploding star or a flying asteroid.
Rubin tested out its alert system for the first time on February 24, 2026. By photographing a patch of sky for which previous surveys had already built up a sufficient template, Rubin was able to ping 800,000 alerts in a single night.
“Everything that changed, appeared, or disappeared was cataloged and triggered an alert,” said Stephen Smartt of the University of Oxford. Smartt serves as scientific lead for Lasair, one of the seven data brokers that will help astronomers sift through Rubin’s vast data haul for discoveries.
Once the full survey begins this summer, Rubin is expected to produce 7 million alerts and 20 terabytes of data a night.
For just one example of how this firehose of data is expected to transform our understanding of the cosmos, consider supernovas, the brilliant death throes of exhausted stars.
Back in the late 1990s, two teams of astronomers used observations of under 100 “Type Ia” supernovas to make a revolutionary discovery about our universe: Its expansion is accelerating due to a still-mysterious force called dark energy. Once Rubin is fully up and running, researchers expect to find 250,000 such supernovas in a year.
Scientists hope that Rubin’s supernova data can help resolve the Hubble tension, the observation that the early universe appears to have expanded faster than the more recent universe. “We want to collect huge samples of Type Ia supernovae to probe this acceleration in much greater detail,” Smartt said.
Smartt is also interested in finding failed supernovas, which occur when stars collapse in on themselves rather than exploding outward. They might have their origins, paradoxically, in the most massive stars. In February 2026, scientists pinpointed a possible candidate in the Andromeda galaxy.
Rubin, with the exquisite detail of its images, is well placed to find these types of events, in which stars disappear in explosions that can be too faint for other surveys to see. “It goes down 100 times fainter than other sky surveys,” Smartt said.
Visitors From Afar
Rubin can also be used to track interesting and unusual objects passing through our solar system. It’s traditionally been difficult to catch such speedy travelers, at least without a survey that can pick out very faint objects at a rapid pace. Scientists have only ever observed three such interstellar objects — asteroids and comets that were ejected from other stars and fired into our vicinity — giving us insight into material from other solar systems. Rubin has already proved its ability to spot them.
Scientists announced the observation of an interstellar comet called 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025. They detected it without Rubin, via a network of four other telescopes that forms the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which usually finds objects formed nearby.
Other astronomers followed up by looking through Rubin’s initial data and discovered that the observatory had also detected 3I/ATLAS, 10 days earlier. If a similar visitor from afar appears in Rubin’s data during the survey, astronomers will receive an alert.
Scientists don’t know exactly how many more interstellar objects Rubin will find, but they expect it to find at least some. “It could be five to 500,” depending on how often these objects are ejected from their home systems, said Rosemary Dorsey, an astrophysicist at the University of Helsinki in Finland. “I am optimistic there will be some, but if there aren’t, then that is a really interesting problem.”
Going the Distance
One way that astronomers determine the distance to an object in space is by studying its light. As light makes its way toward Earth while traveling through the expanding universe, it shifts toward the red side of the electromagnetic spectrum. The higher the redshift, the more stretched the light is, and the farther its source is from Earth.
Rubin’s preview data allowed scientists to test how well it could measure this light via a technique called photometric redshift, which will let it map galaxies across the universe to probe dark energy and dark matter. “The preview data tells us how accurate those photometric redshifts are going to be,” said Kristen Dage, an astronomer at Curtin University. Rubin performed at least as well as other cutting-edge telescopes, Dage said, but it will measure the redshift of many more galaxies, about 4 billion of the 20 billion galaxies it will find.
Dage expects that this data will also help scientists study fast radio bursts (FRBs), bright, unexplained flashes of radio waves in the sky possibly linked to highly magnetized stars called magnetars. While Rubin cannot detect radio waves, photometric redshift data will help scientists work out the distances to FRBs if they can be sourced to a host galaxy Rubin can measure, which could help scientists determine the processes that trigger them.
All of this is just a smattering of what scientists are hoping to explore when Rubin comes online. With it, a new era of astronomy is set to begin.
“Rubin is going to be putting out so much data, so many alerts every night, that everybody’s going to struggle to keep up with [the] information,” Frazer said — a challenge, but a delightful problem to have.