Over 1,700 asteroid trails have been found in Hubble data. More than 1,000 asteroids are not known. Is there anything good about another 1,000 asteroids? They could hold valuable clues to the Solar System's history.
As time goes on, the archival data keeps growing. Sometimes discoveries are found in the data that await new analytical tools or renewed efforts from scientists. That is what happened in the Hubble Asteroid Hunter.
The Hubble Asteroid Hunter was launched in 2019. It is a citizen science project. They wanted to find new asteroids.
“The amount of data in astronomy archives increases exponentially and we wanted to make use of this amazing data.”
Sandor Kruk, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.
The results of the project were released in a new paper. Sandor Kruk is the lead author.
Kruk said in a press release that one astronomer's trash can be another astronomer's treasure. The data they searched for was not used in other observational efforts. In many cases, the data would have been removed to make it stand out. The amount of data in astronomy archives increases every year, and we wanted to make use of it.
More than 37,000 Hubble images were examined by the project. They were taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. asteroid trails look like curved streaks because most images are 30-minute long.
The problem is that computers can't detect the streaks. The Zooniverse platform and citizen scientists can be found there.
Due to the motion of Hubble, it is difficult to tell a computer how to detect asteroid trails.
The volunteers were there. 11,482 citizen scientists were involved in the project. The Hubble Asteroid Hunter page at Zooniverse had over 2 million clicks, and the volunteers provided 1488 positive classifications in about 1% of the images.
The citizens who took part trained a machine-learning algorithm to find the rest of the images quickly and accurately. The Hubble data contains 2487 potential asteroid trails, and after it was trained, the algorithm in the cloud contributed another 900 detections.
The scientists played their part. Sandor Kruk was the lead author of the paper. 1701 trails were found in 1316 Hubble images because they excluded things like Cosmic rays and other objects. One-third of them were known asteroids.
Follow-up observations will show how many of them are asteroids. Some of 1031 will not be confirmed, but the rest will help us understand our Solar System's asteroid population.
The asteroids have escaped detection because they are fainter and smaller than most asteroids detected from the ground. The paper is part of the Hubble Asteroid Hunter project. The authors will use the curved shape of the asteroid trails to determine their distances in subsequent papers.
Most of the asteroids are remnants from the Solar System's early days. They are like nature's time capsule, and they preserve the conditions in the early system. Astronomers are interested in asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu because of that.
The asteroids are remnants from the formation of our Solar System, which means that we can learn more about the conditions when our planets were born.
More and more researchers are using archival data. It is economical to take existing images and use them for new discoveries. Researchers used archival images from exoplanet surveys to identify over 1800 asteroids, with 182 potential new discoveries.
A detailed description of the small bodies in the Solar System puts constraints on the different Solar System formation scenarios.
Time-Consuming surveys are expensive. The proposals face stiff competition from other researchers.
There were other finds in the data that we are currently looking into.
Kruk wouldn't say what the other finds were in the images. He told Universe Today that the findings are not related to unusual asteroids. We will report them soon in publications and announcements.
We will.
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