Five New Asteroids Surprise Astronomers In Hubble Images (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Five previously unknown asteroids in our solar system have photobombed new Hubble Space Telescope images. Astronomers spotted the space rocks -- plus another two that had been previously catalogued in images collected as part of the Frontier Fields project, which observed six clusters of galaxies billions of light-years away. When multiple exposures obtained at different times were stacked together to produce the image above, the asteroids showed up as trails because they had moved between exposures, and some of the asteroids were spotted more than once. The five new asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Previous studies missed them because they're extremely faint

Comments

If I had a choice...

[Fragholio]

I'd rather be photobombed by an asteroid than regular bombed by one.

Re:To put into perspective...

[Applehu Akbar]

It’s newsworthy because, after all these years of detailed searches for asteroids using different instruments, some of them specially optimized for the purpose, we find a few new ones unexpectedly using Hubble. How many more, including Earth crossing threats, have been missed?