- 4453
- ASTEROID DISCOVERIES - how
many are there? The key to protecting
Earth from being hit by asteroids is knowing where all these are. We have
discovered over 27,000 overlooked asteroids in old telescope images. Asteroids in our solar system had been
overlooked in existing telescope images.
-
--------------- 4453
- ASTEROID DISCOVERIES
- how many are there?
-
- Thanks to a new AI-powered algorithm, we now
have a catalog of these asteroids. The scientists behind the discovery say the
tool makes it easier to find and track millions of asteroids, including
potentially dangerous ones that might strike Earth someday. It is for those
threatening space rocks that the world would need years of advance warning
before trying to deflect them away from our planet.
-
- Most of the newfound asteroids hover in the
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where scientists have already cataloged
over 1.3 million such rocky shards over the past 200 years. The latest bounty,
discovered in about five weeks, also includes about 150 space rocks whose paths
glide them within Earth's orbit;
however, none of these "near-Earth asteroids" seem to be on a
collision path with our planet.
-
- Other asteroids are “Trojans” that follow
Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. Astronomers conventionally find new
asteroids by studying pockets of our sky over and over again, through telescope
images gathered multiple times each night, usually every few hours.
-
- While planets, stars and galaxies in the
background remain unchanged from one image to the next, asteroids are spotted
as specks of light that move noticeably, which are then flagged and verified.
From there, orbits of these asteroids are determined and monitored.
-
- This is really a job for AI. The algorithm Lu's team developed, known as
“Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery”, or THOR, analyzed over 400,000
archival images of the sky maintained by the National Optical-Infrared
Astronomy Research Laboratory, NOIRLab.
-
- As long as there are about five
observations in 30 days associated with the same pocket of the sky, the
algorithm can get to work. It's trained on a large dataset that makes it
capable of analyzing as many as 1.7 billion light dots in just a single
telescope image. It is designed to scope out and connect a point of light from
one image of the sky to another one in a different image, and determine whether
both specks represent the same object.
More often than not, that indicates an asteroid moving through space.
-
- The scientists scaled their algorithm using
Google Cloud, whose computational heft and data storage services made it easier
for the scientists to test out thousands of orbits of asteroid candidates.
-
- Not only can we find asteroids in datasets
that were never meant for it, but we can make every other telescope in the
world better at finding asteroids. It's
a change in how astronomy is done.
-
- In 2022, THOR was used to discover 100
asteroids that had been undetected in existing telescope images. Other teams of
astronomers have also leveraged AI to find new asteroids. Citizen scientists
spearheaded training of an algorithm that led to the discovery of 1,000 new
asteroids in archival images clicked by the Hubble Space Telescope.
-
- Last July, a software named “HelioLinc3D”
designed to hunt for near-Earth asteroids found a 600-foot-wide space rock
expected to approach within 140,000 miles of Earth. That's closer than the
average distance between our planet and the moon.
-
- Scientists have so far spotted over 2,000
such "potentially hazardous asteroids" and estimate about 2,000 more
are yet to be discovered. Detecting these space rocks in an effort to aid
planetary defense is one of the tasks of the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory
in Chile, for which the asteroid-hunting HelioLinc3D software was developed.
-
- The new 8.4-meter telescope, which is
scheduled to start operations next year, will take images of the southern sky
every night for at least a decade, each image covering 40-full-moons of area.
Scientists say this cadence, supported by AI-based software like THOR and
HelioLinc3D, could help the observatory find as many as 2.4 million asteroids,
double than those now cataloged, in its first six months of operations.
-
-
May 1, 2024 ASTEROID
DISCOVERIES - how many are there? 4450
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--------------------- --- Saturday, May 4, 2024
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