Fexl | Raw Images from Vera Rubin Reveal Something Unexpected

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Fexl | Raw Images from Vera Rubin Reveal Something Unexpected

The April 2026 announcement arrived with its own visualisations, and these were the ones that did the heaviest lifting in conveying what had happened.

The headline animation showed a model of the inner solar system. Every previously known asteroid was rendered as a dark blue point.

Every new Rubin discovery was rendered in light teal. The teal points did not appear scattered randomly. They formed narrow, fanned rays radiating outward, because each ray traced the line of sight along which Rubin had been observing on a given night. Where the telescope looked, new asteroids appeared.

A second chart showed the orbital distribution of all 11,097 new discoveries. Most clustered tightly in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, exactly where solar system models predicted they should be. But woven through that dense cluster were visible empty bands.

Those bands are known as the Kirkwood gaps, regions where Jupiter's gravity has tugged asteroids out of stable orbits over billions of years. Rubin's data resolved them cleanly, in a single submission, on the first attempt.

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Fexl | Raw Images from Vera Rubin Reveal Something Unexpected

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