Asteroid treasure trove found in old Hubble data
In a new study, astronomers and amateur scientists have worked together to comb through archival data from Hubble. The project’s aim was to identify asteroids in old data – signals that might have been filtered out as noise in other studies. Because the typical observation time for these instruments is 30 minutes, the team knew that moving asteroids would appear in the images as streaks. But such streaks can be tricky for automated computer systems to detect, making the team’s efforts uniquely valuable. “It’s difficult to tell a computer how to automatically detect them,” said Sandor Kruk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich.
11,482 volunteers perused thousands of images for streaks. They made 1,488 tentative identifications of asteroids in about one per cent of the images. The astronomers then trained an algorithm to search for additional asteroid trails in the data that may have been missed, adding about 900 detections, totalling 2,487 possible asteroids. About one-third were identified as known asteroids listed in the Minor Planet Center’s database of Solar System objects, while two-thirds of the trails remain unidentified.