Astronomers recently used a trove of archived images taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to...
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.
Finding a lot of small asteroids favours the idea that they are fragments of larger asteroids that have collided and broken apart, like smashed pottery.
Because of Hubble's fast orbit around Earth, it can capture wandering asteroids through their telltale trails in the Hubble exposures.
Asteroids 'photobomb' Hubble exposures by appearing as unmistakable, curved trails in Hubble photographs.
As Hubble moves around Earth, it changes its point of view while observing an asteroid, which also moves along its own orbit.
The asteroids snagged mostly dwell in the main belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
"As astronomers we don't have time to go looking through all the asteroid images. So we got the idea to collaborate with more than 10 000 citizen-science volunteers to peruse the huge Hubble archives."
In 2019 an international group of astronomers launched the Hubble Asteroid Hunter, a citizen-science project to identify asteroids in archival Hubble data.
The project will next explore the streaks of previously unknown asteroids to characterise their orbits and study their properties, such as rotation periods.
Because most of these asteroid streaks were captured by Hubble many years ago, it is not possible to follow them up now to determine their orbits.