Digging through the archives of Hubblea participatory project that combines artificial intelligence and identification by amateurs has identified 1,701 new traces asteroids.
More than a thousand of these parasitic features correspond to small unknown asteroids, probably located between Mars and Jupiter. Like what, everything is good on these shots!
Lines and asteroids
These are 37,000 identified images, captured by the Hubble space telescope (and more precisely by its ACS and WFC3 instruments) between 2002 and 2021, which have been sifted through a participatory project. Launched in June 2019, the initiative was called ” Hubble Asteroid Hunter and came from European scientists and astronomers. It was done in collaboration with the zooniverse platform, which allows the general public to take part in various small participatory science projects.
11,400 people answered the call and identified curves on the long exposures of the orbiting telescope. When taking photos that last up to 30 minutes, a “nearby” asteroid (on an astronomical scale) appears as a curvy “S” or “C” line. Then, from this knowledge base, an artificial intelligence was trained and completed the study.
Pebbles that leave traces
Finally, 1,701 tracks were formally identified, out of 1,316 images taken by Hubble… And these lines provide important information on the asteroid’s distance, its speed and sometimes even its rotation period.
Thanks to the gigantic catalog of minor objects present in the Solar System, the researchers determined that 1,031 of these traces are not part of the known records. Some lines are indeed too short or too faint to give clues. In addition, the small asteroids that have been detected are mostly part of the belt between Mars and Jupiter, where a large amount of small bodies still undetected reside.
Is it possible to go further?
The next logical step would be to be able to identify these thousand new asteroids and to characterize them… But even if it will be possible to learn a lot from them, astrophysicists consider for the moment that it is impossible to calculate with reliability and precision the orbital parameters of these asteroids, in particular if they were observed only once during a few minutes.
This new reference of “parasitic” objects will nevertheless be able to provide size and distance information, and will allow better documentation of the Asteroid Belt. In addition, the project was able to capitalize on public support for participatory science, highlight learning and detection algorithms, and finally… remember that all the elements of astronomical images from a telescope like Hubble can contain scientific data. !
Source : ESA
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