Science buffs discover more than 1,000 uncatalogued asteroids

The analysis by amateurs, with subsequent supervision by scientists, of 37,000 photographs taken over 19 years by the telescope Hubble, of the POT and the European Space Agency (ESA), has made it possible to catalog 1,031 asteroids small ones that had gone unnoticed.

The discovery led by researchers from the Autonomous University of Madrid and the European Center for Space Astronomy in Madrid is published in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“There was some indication that this population of small asteroids existed, but now we confirmed it by analyzing random photographs from the Hubble archive. And it is important to provide ideas about the evolutionary models of our Solar System.”stresses Pablo García Martín, researcher at the autonomous agency in a statement from the ESA.

Result of a crushing

The discovery of many small asteroids leads us to think, according to the authors, that they are fragments of larger asteroids that have collided and broken into pieces, leaving them as if they were a mass of crushed ceramic, in a process of “trituration” that would have lasted billions of years.

In total, the 11,482 amateurs who have collaborated with the project found 1,701 asteroid traces in the two-decade photographic archive, of which 1,031 were uncatalogued.

Of those not catalogued, about 400 are less than a kilometer in size. Because of Hubble’s fast orbit around Earth, the telescope can pick up stray asteroids through their trails.

Their trail gives them away

And the asteroids “photobomb”so to speak, the Hubble exposures, leaving unmistakable curved trails in the photographs taken by the telescope.

As Hubble moves around the Earth, it changes its point of view as it observes an asteroid, which is also moving along its own orbit.

By knowing Hubble’s position during observation and measuring the curvature of the trails, scientists can determine the distances to asteroids and estimate the shapes of their orbits.

The asteroids captured are mainly found in a main belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Hubble’s sensitive cameras measure its brightness and, comparing it with the distance, allow its size to be estimated.

Asteroid seekers

In 2019, an international group of astronomers launched Hubble Asteroid Hunter, a citizen science project to identify asteroids in archival Hubble data.

The initiative was developed by researchers and engineers from the European Science and Technology Center (ESTEC) and the scientific data center of the European Space Astronomy Center (ESDC), in collaboration with Zooniverse, the largest and most popular citizen science platform in the world. , and Google.

The 11,482 volunteers made almost two million identifications after receiving some training. Next, the project will explore the striations of previously unknown asteroids to characterize their orbits and study their properties.

It may interest you