More than 1,700 asteroid contrails have been discovered in Hubble Space Telescope archived data. The contrails were discovered in roughly 40,000 photographs shot over two decades by a project launched on Asteroid Day 2019 that brought together citizen scientists and an artificial intelligence algorithm taught by them.

The Hubble Asteroid Hunter project, established in partnership with many universities by researchers and engineers, is a citizen science endeavor. Participants examine archived Hubble telescope pictures in order to locate asteroids.

Over 1,000 tracks were detected by nearly 11,400 people who studied the photographs. The information was utilized to train an artificial intelligence algorithm (AI). Finally, a dataset of 1,701 contrails found in 1,316 Hubble photos was created using a combination of citizen science and AI.

Asteroid contrails have been traced to known asteroids in about 30% of cases. The 1,301 contrails that have remained are diffuse and are thought to have come from asteroids smaller than those discovered during ground scans. The Asteroid Belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, appears to contain the most of them.

Volunteers were also able to identify galaxies, gravitational lenses, and nebulae, as well as discuss their results and receive advice from scientists and other forum participants. The research will now investigate the trails of known asteroids in order to characterize their orbits and learn more about their features, such as size and rotation period.

The experiment and conclusions were described in a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Image Credit: Getty

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