This story was originally published by NASA and is unaltered.

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This story was originally published by NASA and is unaltered.
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Hubble Goes Hunting for Small Main Belt Asteroids [1]

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Date: 2024-04

This Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble's field-of-view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. Several exposures of the galaxy were taken, what is evidence in the dashed pattern. The asteroid appears as a curved trail due to parallax: because Hubble is not stationary, but orbiting Earth, and this gives the illusion that the faint asteroid is swimming along a curved trajectory. The uncharted asteroid is in inside the asteroid belt in our solar system, and hence is 10 trillion times closer to Hubble than the background galaxy. Rather than a nuisance, this type of data are useful to astronomers for doing a census of the asteroid population in our solar system.

NASA, ESA, Pablo García Martín (UAM); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI); Acknowledgment: Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley)

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[1] Url: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-goes-hunting-for-small-main-belt-asteroids/

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