According to CNET, the Hubble Space Telescope is famous for taking spectacular images of the universe, such as galaxies, planets and nebulae. But sometimes smaller features, such as the unique path of an asteroid that acts as a "photo bomb", also attract attention With the joint efforts of citizen scientists, volunteers and artificial intelligence, 1701 asteroid tracks were found in 1316 Hubble images
Hubble is a joint project of NASA and ESA. "The project highlights the potential of Hubble to image faint, previously unknown asteroids and represents a new way to find asteroids in astronomical archives spanning decades, which may be effectively applied to other data sets," the ESA Hubble team said in a statement on Friday
Zooniverse platform hosted "Hubble asteroid hunter ”Project. More than 11400 volunteers combed Hubble images taken between 2002 and 2021 to identify the curved trajectory of asteroids in these observations. This effort helped train an artificial intelligence system to find and track these tracks.
About a third of the tracks can be traced to known asteroids, but this leaves 1031 mysterious tracks, probably related to the dim asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. ESA described these asteroids as "inadequately studied".
"These trajectories can provide astronomers with insightful clues about the conditions under which planets formed in the early solar system," said the ESA Hubble team
Next, the data will be used to help researchers learn more about the orbit and size of unknown asteroids.