A group of astronomers from across the globe, including a team from the University of Washington 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.  

Although astronomers have ruled out a smash-up between Earth and an asteroid known as 2024 YR4 in the year 2032, the building-sized space rock still has a chance of hitting the moon. 

With the ramping up of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, Microsoft software architect Charles Simonyi joins a select group of scientists and technologists, policymakers and philanthropists who have had world-class telescopes and observatories named after them.

“Over the last decade, many astronomers, like me, have conducted painstaking studies to develop trust in machine learning.” Aritra Ghosh, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, is one of those astronomers.