Deep space exposure provides clear evidence for asteroids passing through the celestial background. More than 4 billion years ago, eight major planets around the Sun were formed by removing huge dust and gas disk debris around the Sun, which is a common phenomenon in the planet formation process.
The Hubble Space Telescope is the first telescope to optically observe disk-like circles around newborn stars, offering a glimpse into the early days of the solar system, and today, 4 billion years later, planet-building sites are still littered with debris, ancient space debris called asteroids, mainly distributed in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Spanning many years, the Hubble Files are full of images of asteroids orbiting asteroids, not intended targets, but filled with a background of stars and galaxies. The wide range and weak brightness of asteroids, combined with their rapid orbit around the Sun, made it a difficult task to find them, but with the help of volunteer citizen scientists around the world, 1,701 asteroid trajectories were identified, 1,031 of which were uncataloged, of which about 400 were less than 1 kilometer in diameter. Scientists combining the efforts of volunteers with machine learning algorithms to identify asteroids is a new way to find asteroids from astronomical documents spanning decades, and can also be used in other databases.
The Hubble telescope found a map of asteroid size and number. Asteroids are not intended to be observed, but they fill the background of stars and galaxies. A total of 37,000 images of Hubble over 19 years, completed through citizen science volunteers and artificial intelligence algorithms, found 1,701 unregistered asteroid tracks (Source: Pablo García Martín (UAM) / Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI))
The researchers said they were surprised to see so many candidate asteroids, which are indications of the existence of this group, which can be confirmed by random asteroid population samples obtained through the Hubble Document, which is important for understanding the evolutionary model of the solar system and providing new insights into the formation and evolution of the asteroid belt. Smaller asteroids may be fragments of large asteroids from past collisions, or formed billions of years ago without any mechanism that would make them snowball.
Hubble's asteroid is a curved trajectory due to the parallax effect, Hubble is not stationary, but orbits the Earth rapidly, making the faint asteroid appear to be moving along a curved trajectory. Astronomers can use Hubble to observe process positions and measure the curvature of fringes, determine asteroid distances, and estimate orbital shapes. Most of the captured asteroids are located in the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and the brightness can be measured by a Hubble sensitive camera, and the size can be estimated by comparing the brightness with the distance. The dimest asteroid is about 1/40 million brightness of the faintest star visible to the human eye.
Unknown asteroid fringes will be explored to determine orbital characteristics and characteristics such as rotation periods. Since the asteroid streaks were captured by the Hubble telescope many years ago, it is not possible to follow up on determining the orbit. The research results were published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Hubble's image of UGC 12158 looks like someone has drawn a curved trajectory with a white pen, but it is actually the result of a foreground asteroid passing through Hubble's field of vision, forming a dotted line in the image due to multiple exposures of the galaxy. Because parallax makes this asteroid look like a curved trajectory. This unknown asteroid is located within the asteroid belt of the solar system, so it is 10 trillion times closer to the Hubble telescope than the background galaxy. （Source：NASA/ESA/Pablo García Martín (UAM)）
（首图来源：Pixabay）