Deep-Sky Exposure Yields Telltale Evidence for Asteroid Moving Across the Celestial Background
Over 4 billion years ago, the eight major planets around our Sun formed by sweeping up debris from a vast disk of dust and gas surrounding the Sun. This is common to the planet birthing process, and the Hubble Space Telescope was the first to optically see similar disks surrounding newborn stars, providing a peek into the solar system's formative years. Now, 4 billon years later, the planet construction yard is still cluttered with leftover debris.
Most of this ancient space rubble, called asteroids, can be found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter within the main asteroid belt. The census of the asteroid population is ongoing. Hubble's unique capabilities allow it to be used as an "asteroid hunter" for this task. Asteroids appear as curved trails in Hubble images. The trails are due to parallax because Hubble is not stationary, but orbiting Earth. This gives the illusion that the faint asteroids are swimming along curved trajectories.
The Hubble archives, spanning many years, are loaded with images that capture wayward asteroids trekking along their orbits. They were not the intended targets, but instead photobombed background stars and galaxies. Finding these asteroids is sort of a game of Where's Waldo. It was recognized this would be a Herculean effort for any group of astronomers, so the researchers relied on a small army of volunteer citizen scientists to peruse the gaggle of Hubble photos. What they found was applied to machine learning to dig out even more asteroids. The project identified 1,701 asteroid trails. Most of the asteroids are too small to have been previously detected without Hubble's sharp resolution and ultraviolet-light sensitivity.
Find additional articles, images, and videos at HubbleSite.org
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