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 history of the Solar System.
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 happened in the Hubble Asteroid Hunter.
The Hubble Asteroid Hunter was launched in 2019. It is a citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform. They wanted to find new asteroids.
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.
Asteroid 2001 SE101 passed in front of the Crab Nebula. Melina Thévenot is an astronomer.
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 data is still available.
The amount of data in astronomy archives increases rapidly, and we wanted to use 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.
Sandor Kruk explained that due to the motion of Hubble, the streaks appear curved in the images, which makes it difficult to classify asteroid trails.
We needed volunteers to do an initial classification, which we used to train a machine-learning algorithm.
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 percent 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.
M. Zamani is a member of theHubble Asteroid Hunter citizen science team.
The Asteroid Hunter citizen science project studied 16 different data sets from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The blue tones represent the first exposure that the asteroid was captured in and the red tones are the last one.
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 are collecting samples from them.
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.
The Hubble Asteroid Hunter.
There is a sky-map of the Solar System objects identified in the Hubble images. The blue stars show asteroids. The orange circles show the location of objects that the team did not find any associations with. The ecliptic is red. The two gaps in the plot are related to the Galactic plane.
More and more researchers are using archival data. It is economical to look at existing images for new discoveries.
The use of archival data is common in asteroid science. Several groups have used various image archives to find SSOs.
Researchers used archival images from exoplanet surveys to identify over 1800 asteroids in 2019.
Astronomers want a complete understanding of the Solar System's asteroid population because it helps clarify the Solar System's history.
The authors explain that a detailed description of the small bodies in the Solar System puts constraints on the different Solar System formation scenarios, which make concrete predictions on the size and distribution of objects as a function of time.
Time-Consuming surveys are expensive. Other researchers with other foci are competing for the attention of observing proposals.
The authors decided to use a large archival dataset to produce the survey.
There were other finds in the data that we are currently looking into.
He said that they intend to use their approach again.
Using a combination of human and artificial intelligence to sift through vast amounts of data is a big game-changer, and we will also use these techniques for other upcoming surveys.
Kruk wouldn't say what the other serendipitous finds were in the images. He told Universe Today that the findings are not related to unusual asteroids but to other findings in the data. We will report them soon in publications and announcements.
We will.
The article was published by Universe Today. The original article is worth a read.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
