{"id":25529,"date":"2024-12-10T11:22:26","date_gmt":"2024-12-10T05:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=25529"},"modified":"2024-12-10T11:22:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-10T05:37:30","slug":"astronomers-find-the-smallest-asteroids-ever-detected-in-the-main-belt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/astronomers-find-the-smallest-asteroids-ever-detected-in-the-main-belt\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers find the smallest asteroids ever detected in the main belt\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The team\u2019s detection method, which identified 138 space rocks ranging from bus- to stadium-sized, could aid in tracking potential asteroid impactors.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
An artist\u2019s illustration of NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope revealing, in the infrared, a population of small main-belt asteroids. IMAGE:<\/strong> Ella Maru and Julien de Wit<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

Jennifer Chu<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —\u00a0The asteroid that extinguished the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about 10\u00a0kilometers across. That\u2019s about as wide as Brooklyn, New York. Such a massive impactor is predicted to hit Earth rarely, once every 100 million to 500 million years.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, much smaller asteroids, about the size of a bus, can strike Earth more frequently, every few years. These \u201cdecameter\u201d asteroids, measuring just tens of meters across, are more likely to escape the main asteroid belt and migrate in to become near-Earth objects. If they make impact, these small but mighty space rocks can send shockwaves through entire regions, such as the 1908 impact in Tunguska, Siberia, and the 2013 asteroid that broke up in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Urals. Being able to observe decameter main-belt asteroids would provide a window into the origin of meteorites. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, an international team led by physicists at MIT has found a way to spot the smallest decameter asteroids within the main asteroid belt\u2014a rubble field between Mars and Jupiter where millions of asteroids orbit. Until now, the smallest asteroids that scientists were able to discern there were about a kilometer in diameter. With the team\u2019s new approach, scientists can now spot asteroids in the main belt as small as 10 meters across.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature<\/a><\/em>, the researchers report that they have used their approach to detect more than 100 new decameter asteroids in the main asteroid belt. The space rocks range from the size of a bus to several stadiums wide, and are the smallest asteroids within the main belt that have been detected to date. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers envision that the approach can be used to identify and track asteroids that are likely to approach Earth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have been able to detect near-Earth objects down to 10 meters in size when they are really close to Earth,\u201d says the study\u2019s lead author, Artem Burdanov, a research scientist in MIT\u2019s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. \u201cWe now have a way of spotting these small asteroids when they are much farther away, so we can do more precise orbital tracking, which is key for planetary defense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study\u2019s co-authors include MIT professors of planetary science Julien de Wit and Richard Binzel, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions, including the University of Liege in Belgium, Charles University in the Czech Republic, the European Space Agency, and institutions in Germany including Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and the University of Oldenburg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image shift<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

De Wit and his team are primarily focused on searches and studies of exoplanets \u2014 worlds outside the solar system that may be habitable. The researchers are part of the group that in 2016 discovered a planetary system around TRAPPIST-1, a star that\u2019s about 40 light years from Earth. Using the Transiting Planets and Planetismals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, the team confirmed that the star hosts rocky, Earth-sized planets, several of which are in the habitable zone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists have since trained many telescopes, focused at various wavelengths, on the TRAPPIST-1 system to further characterize the planets and look for signs of life. With these searches, astronomers have had to pick through the \u201cnoise\u201d in telescope images, such as any gas, dust, and planetary objects between Earth and the star, to more clearly decipher the TRAPPIST-1 planets. Often, the noise they discard includes passing asteroids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor most astronomers, asteroids are sort of seen as the vermin of the sky, in the sense that they just cross your field of view and affect your data,\u201d de Wit says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

De Wit and Burdanov wondered whether the same data used to search for exoplanets could be recycled and mined for asteroids in our own solar system. To do so, they looked to \u201cshift and stack,\u201d an image processing technique that was first developed in the 1990s. The method involves shifting multiple images of the same field of view and stacking the images to see whether an otherwise faint object can outshine the noise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Applying this method to search for unknown asteroids in images that are originally focused on far-off stars would require significant computational resources, as it would involve testing a huge number of scenarios for where an asteroid might be. The researchers would then have to shift thousands of images for each scenario to see whether an asteroid is indeed where it was predicted to be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several years ago, Burdanov, de Wit, and MIT graduate student Samantha Hasler found they could do that using state-of-the-art graphics processing units that can process an enormous amount of imaging data at high speeds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They initially tried their approach<\/a> on data from the SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) survey \u2014 a system of ground-based telescopes that takes many images of a star over time. This effort, along with a second application<\/a> using data from a telescope in Antarctica, showed that researchers could indeed spot a vast amount of new asteroids in the main belt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAn unexplored space\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the new study, the researchers looked for more asteroids, down to smaller sizes, using data from the world\u2019s most powerful observatory\u2014NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is particularly sensitive to infrared rather than visible light. As it happens, asteroids that orbit in the main asteroid belt are much brighter at infrared wavelengths than at visible wavelengths, and thus are far easier to detect with JWST\u2019s infrared capabilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team applied their approach to JWST images of TRAPPIST-1. The data comprised more than 10,000 images of the star, which were originally obtained to search for signs of atmospheres around the system\u2019s inner planets. After processing the images, the researchers were able to spot eight known asteroids in the main belt. They then looked further and discovered 138 new asteroids around the main belt, all within tens of meters in diameter\u2014the smallest main belt asteroids detected to date. They suspect a few asteroids are on their way to becoming near-Earth objects, while one is likely a Trojan\u2014an asteroid that trails Jupiter.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe thought we would just detect a few new objects, but we detected so many more than expected, especially small ones,\u201d de Wit says. \u201cIt is a sign that we are probing a new population regime, where many more small objects are formed through cascades of collisions that are very efficient at breaking down asteroids below roughly 100 meters.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStatistics of these decameter main belt asteroids are critical for modelling,\u201d adds Miroslav Broz, co-author from the Prague Charles University in Czech Republic and a specialist of the various asteroid populations in the solar system. \u201cIn fact, this is the debris ejected during collisions of bigger, kilometers-sized asteroids, which are observable and often exhibit similar orbits about the Sun, so that we group them into \u2018families\u2019 of asteroids.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is a totally new, unexplored space we are entering, thanks to modern technologies,\u201d Burdanov says. \u201cIt\u2019s a good example of what we can do as a field when we look at the data differently. Sometimes there\u2019s a big payoff, and this is one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This work was supported, in part, by the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Czech Science Foundation, and the NVIDIA Academic Hardware Grant Program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The team\u2019s detection method, which identified 138 space rocks ranging from bus- to stadium-sized, could aid in tracking potential asteroid impactors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-space-news"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0.jpg",900,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-200x200.jpg",200,200,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-600x400.jpg",600,400,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-768x512.jpg",750,500,true],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-675x450.jpg",675,450,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0.jpg",900,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0.jpg",900,600,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0.jpg",900,600,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-870x570.jpg",870,570,true],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-600x600.jpg",600,600,true],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-600x600.jpg",600,600,true],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-760x490.jpg",760,490,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-550x360.jpg",550,360,true],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0-95x65.jpg",95,65,true],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0.jpg",640,427,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/MIT_Smallest-Asteroid-01-PRESS_0.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Jennifer Chu"]},"category_info":"Space\/ AstroPhysics<\/a>","tag_info":"Space\/ AstroPhysics","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25531,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25529\/revisions\/25531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}