Over 1700 new asteroid trails found in archival data from Hubble Space Telescope

Astronomers have found more than 1700 new asteroid trails in archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, consisting of more than 37,000 images taken between April 2002 and March 2021 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments.

Over 11,400 members of the public, via the "Hubble Asteroid Hunter" citizen science project to identify asteroids in archival Hubble data, classified and analysed these images that span two decades. Over 1000 trails were identified, providing a training set for an automated algorithm based on AI.

The combination of artificial intelligence and many keen human eyes resulted in a final dataset containing 1701 trails in 1316 Hubble images.

According to the European Space Agency, about one-third of the asteroid trails seen could be identified and attributed to known asteroids in the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre, the largest database of Solar System objects, leaving 1031 unidentified trails that are faint and likely to be smaller asteroids than those detected in ground-based surveys.

The vast majority of these asteroids are expected to be located in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, where asteroids of such small size are as yet poorly studied. The project will now explore the 1031 streaks of previously unknown asteroids to characterise their orbits and study their properties, such as their sizes and rotation periods.

1/ A global citizen science project found over 1700 asteroid trails in Hubble images. Combining artificial intelligence with many keen human eyes, astronomers have found the asteroid trails in 37 000 archival Hubble images that span two decades.🔗 https://t.co/b84W8uePZu pic.twitter.com/vagmWQ3zaG

— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) May 6, 2022

The citizen science project not only illustrates Hubble's value as an asteroid hunter but also reflects how the public can effectively contribute to citizen science initiatives, ESA said.

More information can be found here.