Asteroid treasure trove found in old Hubble data
Reported by Chelsea Gohd
In a new study, astronomers and amateur scientists have worked together to comb through archival data from Hubble. The project’s aim was to identify asteroids in old data – signals that might have been filtered out as noise in other studies. Because the typical observation time for these instruments is 30 minutes, the team knew that moving asteroids would appear in the images as streaks. But such streaks can be tricky for automated computer systems to detect, making the team’s efforts uniquely valuable. “It’s difficult to tell a computer how to automatically detect them,” said Sandor Kruk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich.