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