{"id":10716,"date":"2024-04-18T12:04:48","date_gmt":"2024-04-18T16:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zobi.alcowep.com\/bourtagshdrevxnls658739\/hubble-goes-hunting-for-small-main-belt-asteroids\/"},"modified":"2024-04-18T12:04:48","modified_gmt":"2024-04-18T16:04:48","slug":"hubble-goes-hunting-for-small-main-belt-asteroids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zobi.alcowep.com\/bourtagshdrevxnls658739\/hubble-goes-hunting-for-small-main-belt-asteroids\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubble Goes Hunting for Small Main Belt Asteroids"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hubble Goes Hunting for Small Main Belt Asteroids<\/h2>\n

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5 min read<\/p>\n

Hubble Goes Hunting for Small Main Belt Asteroids<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Like boulders, rocks, and pebbles scattered across a landscape, asteroids come in a wide range of sizes. Cataloging asteroids in space is tricky because they are faint and they don\u2019t stop to be photographed as they zip along their orbits around the Sun.<\/p>\n

Astronomers recently used a trove of archived images taken by NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope<\/a> to visually snag a largely unseen population of smaller asteroids in their tracks. The treasure hunt required perusing 37,000 Hubble images spanning 19 years. The payoff was finding 1,701 asteroid trails, with 1,031 of the asteroids previously uncatalogued. About 400 of these uncatalogued asteroids are below 1 kilometer in size.<\/p>\n

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This Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble\u2019s field-of-view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. Several exposures of the galaxy were taken, what is evidence in the dashed pattern.<\/p>\n

The asteroid appears as a curved trail due to parallax: because Hubble is not stationary, but orbiting Earth, and this gives the illusion that the faint asteroid is swimming along a curved trajectory. The uncharted asteroid is in inside the asteroid belt in our solar system, and hence is 10 trillion times closer to Hubble than the background galaxy. <\/p>\n

Rather than a nuisance, this type of data are useful to astronomers for doing a census of the asteroid population in our solar system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

NASA, ESA, Pablo Garc\u00eda Mart\u00edn (UAM); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI); Acknowledgment: Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley)<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Volunteers from around the world known as \u201ccitizen scientists\u201d contributed to the identification of this asteroid bounty. Professional scientists combined the volunteers\u2019 efforts with machine learning algorithm to identify the asteroids. It represents a new approach to finding asteroids in astronomical archives spanning decades, which may be effectively applied to other datasets, say the researchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are getting deeper into seeing the smaller population of main belt asteroids. We were surprised with seeing such a large number of candidate objects,\u201d said lead author Pablo Garc\u00eda Mart\u00edn of the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. \u201cThere was some hint of this population existing, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The large, random sample offers new insights into the formation and evolution of the asteroid belt. Finding a lot of small asteroids favors the idea that they are fragments of larger asteroids that have collided and broken apart, like smashed pottery. This is a grinding-down process spanning billions of years.<\/p>\n

An alternative theory for the existence of smaller fragments is that they formed that way billions of years ago. But there is no conceivable mechanism that would keep them from snowballing up to larger sizes as they agglomerated dust from the planet-forming circumstellar disk around our Sun. \u201cCollisions would have a certain signature that we can use to test the current main belt population,\u201d said co-author Bruno Mer\u00edn of the European Space Astronomy Centre, in Madrid, Spain .<\/p>\n

Amateur Astronomers Teach AI to Find Asteroids<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because of Hubble\u2019s fast orbit around the Earth, it can capture wandering asteroids through their telltale trails in the Hubble exposures. As viewed from an Earth-based telescope, an asteroid leaves a streak across the picture. Asteroids \u201cphotobomb\u201d Hubble exposures by appearing as unmistakable, curved trails in Hubble photographs.<\/p>\n

As Hubble moves around the Earth, it changes its point of view while observing an asteroid, which also moves along its own orbit. By knowing the position of Hubble during the observation and measuring the curvature of the streaks, scientists can determine the distances to the asteroids and estimate the shapes of their orbits.<\/p>\n

The asteroids snagged mostly dwell in the main belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Their brightness is measured by Hubble\u2019s sensitive cameras. And comparing their brightness to their distance allows for a size estimate. The faintest asteroids in the survey are roughly one forty-millionth the brightness of the faintest star that can be seen by the human eye.<\/p>\n

\u201cAsteroid positions change with time, and therefore you cannot find them just by entering coordinates, because at different times, they might not be there,\u201d said Mer\u00edn. \u201cAs astronomers we don\u2019t have time to go looking through all the asteroid images. So we got the idea to collaborate with over 10,000 citizen-science volunteers to peruse the huge Hubble archives.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2019 an international group of astronomers launched the Hubble Asteroid Hunter, a citizen-science project to identify asteroids in archival Hubble data. The initiative was developed by researchers and engineers at the European Science and Technology Centre (ESTEC) and the European Space Astronomy Centre\u2019s science data center (ESDC), in collaboration with the Zooniverse platform, the world\u2019s largest and most popular citizen-science platform, and Google.<\/p>\n

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This graph is based on Hubble Space Telescope archival data that was used to identify a largely unseen population of very small asteroids in their tracks. The asteroids were not the intended targets, but instead photobombed background stars and galaxies in Hubble images. The comprehensive treasure hunt required perusing 37,000 Hubble images spanning 19 years. This was accomplished by using \u201ccitizen science\u201d volunteers and artificial intelligence algorithms. The payoff was finding 1,701 asteroid trails of previously undetected asteroids.<\/div>\n
Pablo Garc\u00eda Mart\u00edn (UAM), Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A total of 11,482 citizen-science volunteers, who provided nearly 2 million identifications, were then given a training set for an automated algorithm to identify asteroids based on artificial intelligence. This pioneering approach may be effectively applied to other datasets.<\/p>\n

The project will next explore the streaks of previously unknown asteroids to characterize 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.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0findings<\/a>\u00a0are published in the journal\u00a0Astronomy and Astrophysics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To learn how you can participate in citizen science projects related to NASA, visit\u00a0https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/citizen-science\/<\/a>. Participation is open to everyone around the world, not limited to U.S. citizens or residents.<\/p>\n

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.<\/p>\n

Learn More:<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\n\t\tHubble Sees Nearby Asteroids Photobombing Distant Galaxies<\/span>
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\n\t\tTracking Evolution in the Asteroid Belt<\/span>
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\n\t\tUncovering Icy Objects in the Kuiper Belt<\/span>
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Media Contact<\/span>:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Claire Andreoli<\/em><\/strong>
NASA\u2019s\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Goddard Space Flight Center<\/em><\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0Greenbelt, MD<\/em><\/strong>
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Science Contact<\/span>:<\/em><\/strong>
Pablo Garc\u00eda Mart\u00edn
Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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