More than 1,000 previously undiscovered space rocks have been found in the solar system after covertly interfering with other cosmic objects for decades.
A new study demonstrates how artificial intelligence and citizen scientists worked together to find the asteroids concealed in Hubble Space Telescope archive photographs, according to Live Science.
According to Nasa, more than 1.3 million space pebbles have previously been found by scientists; the majority are located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
There are probably millions or perhaps hundreds of thousands of asteroids out there that have yet to be found.
But it’s likely the case that the remaining space rocks are the smallest and thus faintest entities in the solar system as a whole, making them incredibly elusive.
In the current study, 1,031 previously unclassified asteroids from historical Hubble data were highlighted by researchers and published on March 15 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Artificial intelligence that was trained to recognise the faint light streaks produced by the small space pebbles by hundreds of citizen scientists was able to identify them.
“We were surprised to see such a large number of candidate objects,” study lead author Pablo García-Martín, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain, said in a statement.
Dr. Thomas Hughes is a UK-based scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to readers. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
