A team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge has reconstructed observations of a distant star’s web to reveal a population of small asteroids — the ones astronomers once thought orbited the Sun. The installation was detected. Major Asteroid Belt Between Mars and Jupiter.
The 138 new asteroids range from the size of a bus to the size of a stadium — a size range in the main belt that is not observable with ground-based telescopes. Knowing how many main belt asteroids there are in different size ranges can tell us something about how asteroids have changed through collisions over time. This process is related to how some of them have survived the main belt of the solar system’s history, and even how meteorites end up on Earth.
“We now understand more about how and how many small objects form in the asteroid belt,” said co-author Tom Green, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. Paper Present the results. “Asteroids of this size likely formed from collisions between large ones in the main belt and are likely to move toward Earth and the Sun.”
Insights from this research can inform the work of the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at Ames. ATAP works in a variety of areas to support NASA. Planetary Defense Coordination Office By studying what would happen in the event of a land impact and modeling the associated risks.
“It’s exciting that the capabilities of the web can be used to gain insight into asteroids,” said Jesse Dotson, an Ames astronomer and ATAP member. “Understanding the size, number, and evolutionary history of Small Main Belt asteroids provides important background on the near-Earth asteroids we study for planetary defense.”
The team that discovered the asteroid, led by research scientist Artem Burdanov and planetary science professor Julien DeWitt, both of MIT, developed a method to analyze existing web images for the presence of asteroids that might inadvertently be detected. but may be “caught on film”. When they passed in front of the telescope. Using new image processing techniques, they studied more than 10,000 images of the star. TRAPPIST-1originally taken to explore the atmospheres around planets orbiting stars, in search of extraterrestrial life.
The asteroid shines brighter in infrared light, the wavelength the web is designed to detect, than in visible light, helping to reveal populations of asteroids in the Main Belt that have gone unnoticed until now. were NASA will also take advantage of this infrared glow with an upcoming mission. Near Earth Object (NEO) surveyor. NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope designed specifically to search for near-Earth asteroids and comets that could be potential threats to Earth.
The paper presenting this research, “Decameter Main Belt Asteroid Detection with JWSTPublished December 9 in Nature.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking at distant worlds around other stars, and investigating the mysterious structure and origins of our universe and our place in it. WEB is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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