Video Showing Half a Million Asteroid Discoveries

An anonymous reader writes "Since 1980 over a half million asteroids have been discovered, mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, now thanks to this video you can see this activity condensed into a few minutes. At full resolution it's a mesmerizing experience as new discoveries are added and the video makes it possible to see patterns in the discovery positions, for example a large number appear in line between Earth and Jupiter as astronomers started looking for smaller jovian moons after Voyagers visit to the system."

Comments

Cheers, astronomers!

[Aussenseiter]

Celebrating 30 years of counting rocks in space. Here's looking at you, kid.

Re:Needs a caption

[mistralol]

You have worked on asteriods? Was the commute better than the average commute in china?

Gives me a cool idea...

[boneclinkz]

For a potential video game. You pilot a small spaceship, and your job is to shoot asteroids with your laser cannon as they appear. When an asteroid is hit, it breaks into several smaller asteroids. You then have to shoot those asteroids until they break up into asteroids so small that they are no longer a danger. If an asteroid impacts your spaceship, you die.

I think they should call it The Ship that Shoots a Laser Cannon.

Re:Needs a caption

[thechemic]

He didnt really work on asteroids. I think the 'a' in asteroids was a typo on his behalf.

Re:Cpt Obvious Observation

[$RANDOMLUSER]

In other news, most optical astronomy is done at night.

Re:I see you!

[BSAtHome]

Ehm, you mean:
One Oracle to rule them all, One Oracle to find them,
One Oracle to bring them all and with its gravity bind them
In the Oracular System where the asteroids fly.

Re:"That's some mighty fine science, Lou."

[ElectricTurtle]

Well you see as a marine biologist I thought it would be really ground breaking if I looked for a new species of fish living in the Gobi Desert. After a lifetime of work I'm sorry to say that there just appear to be no fish living in the Gobi Desert. I know I could have taken the easy route and actually tried to study fish in bodies of water, but that would have been so cliche.