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

Posted by BeauHD on from the photo-bombed dept.

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

33 comments

  1. If I had a choice... by Fragholio · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    412077696e6e657220697320796f7521da
    1. Re:If I had a choice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      These are around Jupitur so nearly million mile away. Relax. Dont do it.When you want to come.

    2. Re: If I had a choice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      Sorry, you don't have a choice.
      Brace yourself for deep impact!

    3. Re: If I had a choice... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Deep Impact is soooo 2005...

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    4. Re:If I had a choice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      These are around Jupitur so nearly million mile away. Relax. Dont do it.When you want to come.

      Reminds me of your mom's pussy

    5. Re:If I had a choice... by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

      These are around Jupitur so nearly million mile away. Relax. Dont do it.When you want to come.

      No, they are in the asteroid belt. From TFA:

      "The five new asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter."

      Not that it matters much. They aren't a threat.

      Also, Jupiter is 365 million miles from Earth when they are closest to each other.

    6. Re:If I had a choice... by phayes · · Score: 1

      quibble
      They are presently in the Asteroid Belt but until their orbits are determined, it is not possible to state with confidence that they do not pose a threat to Earth. It is vanishingly unlikely that they _do_ pose a danger to earth but still...
      /quibble

      --
      Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
    7. Re:If I had a choice... by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

      Point taken, however unlikely it is.

    8. Re: If I had a choice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In order for them to know their distance ( that they are in the asteroid belt ) they had to have already determined their orbit. You can't tell how far away an object is from one photograph.

  2. To put into perspective... by anders4080 · · Score: 2

    According to wikipedia an asteroid is between 1m and 1km in diameter. Roughly 500 000 asteroids have been confirmed in our solar system and another 250k objects with what I assume is vague data. "Among all the surveys, 4711 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered[18] including over 600 more than 1 km (0.6 mi) in diameter." With this information available I wonder, what is news worthy with 5 more found between mars and jupiter?

    1. Re:To put into perspective... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's obviously not that newsworthy, since the story is only a single paragraph. However the image with the curved tracks made by the asteroids showing is cool and unusual, and any interesting space images are always worth a mention.

    2. Re:To put into perspective... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "...what is news worthy with 5 more found between mars and jupiter?"

      Because this is Slashdot and we are hungry for any story that remotely resembles "News for Nerds".

    3. Re:To put into perspective... by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

    4. Re:To put into perspective... by mysticgoat · · Score: 1

      What is newsworthy is that these 5 were found by Hubble and had been missed by earlier attempts to catalog the asteroid belt.

      These are extremely faint objects, that were seen by Hubble while it was gathering extremely faint light from very distant galaxies.

      Hubble has a very narrow field of view.

      To discover 5 faint asteroids in this incidental way suggests that there may be a lot more stuff in the asteroid belt than previously estimated. Anything that fuels that kind of speculation is newsworthy on slashdot, for it is that kind of speculation that drives hypothesis formation, which in turn drives the expansion of scientific knowledge.

    5. Re:To put into perspective... by erapert · · Score: 2

      It's obviously not that newsworthy, since the story is only a single paragraph.

      What does this say about the kind of person who gets a degree in journalism?

  3. Cool curves by jfdavis668 · · Score: 2

    It's cool that the paths across the image are curved. Since the HST is in Earth orbit, the direction to the asteroid changes during the exposure time of the image. From the ground, the Earth's rotation is not fast enough to notice that effect.

  4. Pics or it didn't happen by necro81 · · Score: 1

    The story sounds neat and all, but I can't actually see the purported images. Both links come from Science magazine: one was copied verbatim for the Slashdot posting; the other runs smack into a paywall. Without the pics, it may as well not exist - why bother posting the story at all? My guess is that submitter sciencehabit is a shill for the magazine, and Slashdot bought into it without checking the sources.

    1. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Slashdot bought into it without checking the sources.

      You must be new here.

      Posting shitty, meaningless stories, with no worthwhile content, is pretty must Standard Operating Procedure.

    2. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isn't this copyright infringement? Shouldn't someone take legal action against /. profiteering from someone else's work? Can we try?

    3. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by Tx · · Score: 1

      It is a particularly crappy post. There's not much to the story except for the images, which as you say were not included (bar one) or linked. And science stories should always post references; none in this story.

      I found a set of images accompanying the press release on the Hubble site, accompanying the press release which this story regurgitated.

      --
      Oh no... it's the future.
    4. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by Tx · · Score: 1

      *I found a set of images on the Hubble site, accompanying the press release which this story regurgitated.

      Argh. You know what I meant.

      --
      Oh no... it's the future.
    5. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by myid · · Score: 1

      The story sounds neat and all, but I can't actually see the purported images.

      This, this and this might be the images.

      I did a Google on
      5 asteroids "hubble space telescope" 2017 "frontier fields"

      then picked the link
      News - HubbleSite: Images
      hubblesite.org/images/news - Cached
      Compass Image for Asteroids in Hubble Frontier Fields. Nov 2, 2017.
      Compass Image for Asteroids in Hubble Frontier Fields ...

      That web page has three images dated Nov 2, 2017, whose captions include the word "Asteroids". I'm guessing those images show the newly-discovered asteroids.

    6. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by avandesande · · Score: 1

      You sure they didn't just scrape the emulsion off in the bottom of the tray?

      --
      love is just extroverted narcissism
    7. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by mysticgoat · · Score: 1

      No. I have no idea exactly what you might have meant. It seems that your comment is of the same kind of fuzzy nature as your apparent criticism of TFA.

      Just saying.

    8. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

      Posting shitty, meaningless stories, with no worthwhile content, is pretty must Standard Operating Procedure.

      No Chris, that's your ebooks.... Check your crammar. And stop repeating your hilarious "You must be new here.", it totally doesn't give you away...

    9. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by Tx · · Score: 1

      I said in so many words that TFA is a copy-pasted press release, with links to the most important part - the images - missing, and no attribution. Which part of that do you consider "fuzzy"?

      --
      Oh no... it's the future.
    10. Re:Pics or it didn't happen by mysticgoat · · Score: 2

      Thank you for the clarification.

      I've looked at some of the photos and they are remarkable. Some of the arcs are nearly 3/4ths of a circle, which suggests an exposure time of 3/4ths of hubble's orbit, or about 70 minutes. These were very faint images.

  5. interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Hey, you know what else surprised astronomers in the Hubble images? Linux on the desktop!

    AMIRIGHT?

    1. Re:interesting by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

      Hubble runs on a 486. Does anyone make a distribution that still runs on one?

    2. Re:interesting by Winter+Lightning · · Score: 4, Informative

      Unix and its relatives have dominated desktop computing for professional astronomers for about thirty years. In the 1980s, Sun workstations and Unix mini-supercomputers displaced Digital Equipment Corp's VAX minicomputers, then, as the performance of x86 overtook most of the RISC CPUs, Linux became useful for professional astronomical image processing applications (e.g., AIPS & IRAF). Over the last 10-15 years, MacOS X has also become a major player.

      The adoption of Unix and related open systems standards made porting of applications from one vendor's hardware to another much easier than it was in the days of proprietary operating systems. Of course, Windows did something similar in the wider world, but the x86/Windows combination was later to the show for many scientists and engineers, and, in the early days, not up to the job, both in terms of performance and sophistication of the OS and toolset. Of course, that's changed now, but Unix/Linux (including MacOS) dominates astronomy.

      The story's similar for other fields of physical science and engineering, in academia and industry. A generation of such people largely bypassed the world of Windows for serious work, perhaps only using it when they needed to use proprietary commercial applications. Where they write their own code, it's likely to be on Linux or MacOS.

    3. Re:interesting by mysticgoat · · Score: 1

      Parent post should be modded up as "intersting" and "informative"

    4. Re:interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup. The same with nuclear physics also when I was in college.

  6. Astronomers scanned the Solar System... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...., the results will shock you!