(Sandor Kruk et al. / Astronomy&Astrophysics, 2022)
The citizen science project Hubble Asteroid Hunter published the results of its asteroid searching in the images of the Hubble telescope.
The volunteers found a total of 1,701 objects, and 1,031 of them turned out to be previously unknown asteroids.
The overwhelming majority of asteroids are bodies from the Main Belt and are located near the plane of the ecliptic.
The Hubble Asteroid Hunter (HAH) project was launched in June 2019 on the basis of the Zooniverse citizen science portal.
In this project everyone could study archival images of the Hubble telescope cameras for 31 years of observations.
The images were selected in such a way that the observation epoch and the size of the sky area for these images could be compared with the calculated orbits of asteroids.
The goal of the HAH was both to search for dim asteroids and update statistics on similar bodies in the solar system
The project also tried to train neural networks that will automatically analyze images from telescopes in the future.
A team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics published the results of the project, which is the first large-scale study of the Hubble archive to search for small bodies in the solar system.
They focused on 37,000+ images taken between April 2002 and March 2021 using Hubble's ACS and WFC3 cameras.
With this, the researchers were able to create a database for training an automatic image classifier.
The team detected a total of 1,701 asteroid tracks in the images, 1,031 of them were not found in the database of the Minor Planet Center.
Also, 95% of the asteroids found are from the Main Belt and only 5% are near-Earth asteroids.
The magnitudes of the asteroids were in the range of 18–25, while previously unknown bodies were, on average, 1.6 magnitudes fainter compared to known objects.
Around 96% of the asteroids found are distributed near the plane of the ecliptic, and the rest of the objects have orbits with a high inclination.
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