Over 1,000 New Asteroids Discovered Hidden in Hubble Archives - ScienceAlert

Researchers have found over 1,700 asteroid trails in archived Hubble data from the last 20 years.

Like all asteroids, they could hold valuable clues to the Solar System's history.

Their goal was to comb through Hubble data to find new asteroids.

"Due to the orbit and motion of Hubble itself, the streaks appear curved in the images, which makes it difficult to classify asteroid trails – or rather it is difficult to tell a computer how to automatically detect them," explained Sandor Kruk.

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 algorithm exists in the Google Cloud, and once it was trained, it contributed another 900 detections for a total of 2487 potential asteroid trails in the Hubble data.

They excluded things like cosmic rays and other objects, which resulted in 1701 trails found in 1316 Hubble images.

Above: This mosaic consists of 16 different data sets from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope studied as part of the Asteroid Hunter citizen science project.

All asteroids are remnants from the Solar System's early days, mostly from before the planets formed.

Above This image from the study is a sky-map of the Solar System Objects (SSOs) identified in the Hubble archived images.

More and more researchers are making use of archival data like this.

"The use of archival data produced by imaging campaigns whose primary science goals lie outside the Solar System is common practice in asteroid science.

For example, in 2019, researchers used archival images from exoplanet surveys to identify over 1800 asteroids, with 182 potential new discoveries.

Astronomers want a complete understanding of the Solar System's asteroid population because it helps clarify the Solar System's history.