Large and publicly available astronomical archives open up new possibilities to go looking for and study small system objects like asteroids and comets.
A citizen scientist spotted the main-belt asteroid 2001 SE101 passing ahead of the Crab Nebula. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / M. Thévenot, @AstroMelina.
In its 32 years of observations, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a fashionable archive of many thousands of targeted observations of nebulae, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and gravitational lenses.
Occasionally, closer objects like asteroids cross the telescope’s field of view while the targets are being observed, leaving trails within the images.
In 2019, on International Asteroid Day, professional astronomers launched the Hubble Asteroid Hunter citizen science project on the Universe platform, with the goals of visually identifying asteroids in archival images from the EU, Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope (east) archive and studying their properties.
The initiative was developed by the ecu Science and Technology Center is (ESTER) and therefore the European Space Astronomy Center is Science Data Center is (ESC), unitedly with universe and Google.
First, the astronomers identified quite 37,000 composite images taken between April 2002 and March 2021 with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments.
With a typical observation time of 30 mins, asteroid trails appear as curved lines or streaks in these images. Over 11,400 members of the public then classified and analyzed these images.
More than 1,000 trails were identified, providing a training set for an automatic algorithm supported AI.
The combination of citizen science and AI resulted in an exceedingly final dataset containing 1,701 trails in 1,316 Hubble images.
The project participants also tagged various other astronomical objects, like gravitational lenses, galaxies and nebulae.
Roughly one third of the asteroid trails seenmay well be identified and attributed to known asteroids within the International Astronomical Union’s planeload Center.
This left 1,031 unidentified trails that are faint and sure to be smaller asteroids than those detected in ground-based survey
The overwhelming majority of those asteroids are expected to be located within the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, where asteroids of such small size are hitherto poorly studie
These trails could give the astronomers insightful clues about the conditions within the early system when the planets were formin
“Citizen science and machine learning are very useful techniques for the systematic look for system objects in existing astronomy science data archives,” the researchers sai
“Our work describes a technique for locating new asteroids in astronomical archives that span decades
“It might be effectively applied to other datasets, increasing the sample of well characterized small bodies within the scheme and refining their Epimenides
The results were published during a paper within the journal Astronomy & Astrophysic
Sandor, Uruk et al. Hubble Asteroid Hunter I. Identifying asteroid trails in Hubble Space Telescope images.
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However, because the asteroids are faint and were captured in previous photographs, astronomers are unlikely to be able to piece together enough information about them to have Hubble capture them in its narrow field of view once mor
Clear skies and open eyes are my wishes for you.e..
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