Posted on 05/05/2024 8:53:28 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Our cosmic neighborhood is littered with asteroids. Scientists have already discovered more than 1.3 million of the space rocks, most of which lie in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to NASA. There are likely hundreds of thousands if not millions more asteroids waiting to be discovered. However, these remaining space rocks are likely the smallest and therefore faintest bodies in the solar system, which makes them very hard to spot.
In the new study, published March 15 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers highlighted 1,031 previously uncategorized asteroids from archival Hubble data. They were identified by artificial intelligence (AI) that was trained by thousands of citizen scientists to spot faint streaks of light left behind by the tiny space rocks...
Since 2019, more than 11,000 citizen scientists have been combing through images in search of these streaks. This project, known as Hubble Asteroid Hunter (HAH), has massively helped astronomers who would otherwise have had to sift through the images themselves.
In the new study, researchers gave HAH members a group of Hubble images to sort through and then used the results as a training set for an AI to help it learn how to detect the photobombing space rocks. The team then used this AI to comb through 37,000 Hubble images taken over a 19-year period in search of new asteroids. The AI identified a total of 1,701 candidates, of which 1,031 had never been seen before.
The researchers were surprised by how well the AI identified the asteroids and are now hoping to use similar methods to search through different kinds of archival datasets to pull out other hidden gems from these astronomical treasure troves.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Shields up!...............
The Oort Cloud *may* exist, it was theorized in order to solve some problems. The TNOs are intermediate between the outer Solar system and the KBOs. The Kuiper belt probably does exist. If either has been there throughout the 4.5 billion years of the Solar system, that would make a large reservoir of past and future comets, inner system asteroids, and impactors.
Yes and I also think TNO’s KBO’s and OCO’s (If I may invent that acronym) aren’t all we think they are, since we know very little about them.
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