Five New Asteroids Surprise Astronomers In Hubble Images (sciencemag.org) 33
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
If I had a choice... (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
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quibble
/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...
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Point taken, however unlikely it is.
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To put into perspective... (Score:2)
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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?
Re:To put into perspective... (Score:4, 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?
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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 slashd
Cool curves (Score:3)
Pics or it didn't happen (Score:2)
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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 [hubblesite.org], accompanying the press release [hubblesite.org] which this story regurgitated.
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*I found a set of images on the Hubble site [hubblesite.org], accompanying the press release [hubblesite.org] which this story regurgitated.
Argh. You know what I meant.
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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.
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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"?
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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.
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The story sounds neat and all, but I can't actually see the purported images.
This [hubblesite.org], this [hubblesite.org] and this [hubblesite.org] 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 [hubblesite.org] has three images dated Nov 2, 2017, whose captions include the word "Asteroids". I'm guessing those images show the newly-discovered asteroids.
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Re:interesting (Score:5, 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.
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Parent post should be modded up as "intersting" and "informative"