Citizen scientists spot more than 1,000 new asteroids in old Hubble Telescope photos

This Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality, it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble's field of view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. The asteroid appears as a curved trail due to parallax: Because Hubble is not stationary but orbiting Earth, this gives the illusion that the faint asteroid is swimming along a curved trajectory.

"We are getting deeper into seeing the smaller population of main belt asteroids," Pablo García Martín of the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain said in a "We were surprised with seeing such a large number of candidate objects," he added."This is important for providing insights into the evolutionary models of our solar system."The newfound asteroids help refine the census of main belt asteroids, which is already estimated to be over a million. And some of the newly discovered objects are likely fragments of larger space rocks that broke apart due to collisions, researchers said.

The asteroid trails appear curved in Hubble photos because the telescope changes its point of view as it moves in Earth orbit. To find these trails, scientists stitched together multiple long-exposure shots, which explains the white dashed line. Spotting these telltale signs in deep-sky images is a tough task.

"Asteroid positions change with time, and therefore you cannot find them just by entering coordinates, because at different times, they might not be there," Bruno Merín, of the European Space Astronomy Centre in Spain, said in the same statement."As astronomers, we don't have time to go looking through all the asteroid images."The researchers picked more than 37,000 Hubble photos spanning the past two decades and virtually cut them into four portions.

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