Artificial intelligence trained by citizen scientists helped to uncover more than 1,000 new asteroids from old Hubble telescope photos.Image credit: Shutterstock |
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 ...
Artificial intelligence trained by citizen scientists helped to uncover more than 1,000 new asteroids from old Hubble telescope photos.Image credit: Shutterstock |
2024 Giant Meteor......... Just end it already!........
A.I. may be screwing with us...
I’ve known many astrophysicists, and can see them training/indoctrinating the A.I. engines to make sure those grants keep on coming...
The Kuiper Belt Objects that we know about (Pluto being one) represent just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. And beyond that is the Oort cloud which likely contains far more objects. And somewhere out there planet 9 waits to be discovered, or so they think.
Excellent point! What you described is likely rather easy to do if you can influence how the software is programmed. Why would they NOT make an effort to bias tbe results in their own material favor? Who’s going to spill the beans? No one, provided they get paid enough for keeping tbeir mouths shut.
This is SO timely for me and my son. We went on an excellent guided tour of the Griffith Observatory in Griffith Park, Los Angeles today and the tour guide was talking about meteorites. We got to hold a very heavy iron / nickel meteorite found in Arizona!
“moon zero 2” a movie seen on mst3k show already covered this topic. Check it out..campy , ridiculous, movie and mst3k covers it well.
The Earth will probably get a 'shotgun blast' of related space debris in our lifetimes, probably over water (since most of the surface of the Earth is water), and hopefully not too serious.
When you think about it, when it comes to science we take the vast majority of what we are told as fact with no real way of testing the data ourselves.
I don’t believe the word these people say. We get fuzzy pictures of Bigfoot and fuzzy pictures of U. F. O. S. yet can see galaxies billions of miles away.
Maya from Space 1999 and the guy from Andromeda Strain.
That is how I used to feel about scientific proof. and then Covid happened, and then Trans surgery on middle schoolers happened after that.
I remember that after Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, he spent years looking at many more glass plates, with millions of star images, in an effort to find any more planets that may lie on the edge of our solar system. Imagine what he could have done if he had AI to help!
God is my science teacher.
Quicker link:
Pic looks the inside of Biden’s head.
1st Space Alien: Don’t land there in that planet.
2md Space Alien: Why not?
1st Space Alien: The beings there are crazy! They call their plant ‘Earth’ and it’s over 70% water!.............
How did Enterprise get through all that. ;- )
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