Hubble goes hunting for small main-belt asteroids
Astronomers recently used a trove of archived images taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to visually snag a largely unseen population of smaller asteroids in their tracks. The treasure hunt required pursuing 37 000 Hubble images spanning 19 years. The payoff was finding 1701 asteroid trails, with 1031 of those asteroids uncatalogued. About 400 of these uncatalogued asteroids are about below a kilometre in size.
Volunteers from around the world known as ‘citizen scientists’ contributed to the identification of this asteroid bounty. Professional scientists combined the volunteers’ efforts with machine learning algorithms to identify the asteroids. This represents a new approach to finding asteroids in astronomical archives spanning decades, and it may be effectively applied to other datasets, say the researchers.
“We are getting deeper into seeing the smaller population of main-belt asteroids. We were surprised to see such a large number of candidate objects,” said lead author Pablo García Martín of the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. "There was some hint that this population existed, but now we are confirming it with a random asteroid population sample obtained using the whole Hubble archive. This is important for providing insights into the evolutionary models of our Solar System.”
