Hubble Telescope found asteroids in the Solar System by accident
Thousands of asteroids were discovered thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and a great example of teamwork. Citizen scientists and astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA) led by Pablo García-Martín, a researcher at the University of Madrid, found the space rocks amid archived data from the beloved observatory.
Asteroids are space rocks made of material left over from the formation of the Solar System 4.5 billion years ago. Therefore, they are like time capsules that reveal to scientists the conditions in which our neighborhood in space formed.
However, observing them is not easy because in addition to having a weak glow, the asteroids are traveling around the Sun all the time. This is where Hubble comes in: as it orbits the Earth quickly, the telescope is able to capture signals from the asteroids, that appear as traces in the images.
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These tracks are curved and undoubtedly indicate the presence of a space rock. As the telescope’s perspective changes throughout its orbit (after all, the asteroids are also in motion), scientists simply need to know Hubble’s position and the curve of the tracks to estimate the distance and shape of the asteroids.
With this in mind, in 2019 astronomers from the European Science and Technology Center (ESTEC) and the Scientific Data Center of the European Space Astronomy Center (ESDC) created the Hubble Asteroid Hunter (HAH), a project to search for asteroids in old data from the Hubble. The idea was to investigate why smaller asteroids had not accumulated more dust from the disk that gave rise to the Sun and the planets.
HAH’s more than 11,000 volunteers analyzed 37,000 Hubble images captured over 19 years. After identifying almost 2 million objects, they received data to train an automated algorithm, which would identify asteroids in the images.
That’s how they arrived at 1,701 asteroid tracks, 1,031 of which belonged to space rocks not yet catalogued. According to ESA, “this pioneering initiative can be effectively applied to other datasets”.
For the next steps, project members will explore the tracks of unknown asteroids to learn more about their orbits and properties. Most of the tracks were detected by Hubble many years ago, meaning they cannot now be used to determine orbits.
The article describing the findings was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics
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