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The Space Telescope
of Hubble is the oldest surviving space telescope, having spent the last twenty-eight years in orbit. Nevertheless, this mission is still difficult at work, revealing things about our solar system, neighboring exoplanets and some of the farthest parts of the Universe. And from time to time, he also captures an image that happens to reveal something interesting and unexpected.
Recently, in a study of Abell 370, a cluster of galaxies located approximately four billion light-years away in the Sea Monster constellation), Hubble a managed to spot something in the foreground. While observing this collection of several hundred galaxies, the image was photographed by 22 asteroids whose tails created streaks that resembled astronomical background phenomena
The study was part of the Frontier program Fields, where Hubble captured images of some of the first Universe galaxies (aka "relict galaxies") to determine how they evolved over time. The position of this asteroid field is close to the ecliptic (the plane of our solar system) where most asteroids reside, which is why Hubble's astronomers saw so much of pbadages. through the Earth. Credit: ESA
In the past, Hubble recorded many examples of asteroid streaks when he was performing observations along a line of sight near the plane of our solar system. In this case, near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) – orbiting the Earth at an average distance of about 260 million km (161.5 million mi) – were not detected before due to their weakness. But thanks to the images taken by Hubble, the scientists were able to identify them manually according to their movement.
Of the 22 asteroids, five were identified as single objects. The image was badembled from several exposures taken in visible and infrared light, which was released on November 6, 2017. The image was prepared in the honor of "Asteroid Day", an annual global event that takes place on June 30th asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth from possible impact.
The day falls on the anniversary day of the Tunguska event, which took place on June 30, 1918 in eastern Russia and resulted in the flattening of 2,000 square kilometers. 770 m² square) of forest. Although much less harmful than the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event – which occurred 66 million years ago and which would have killed the dinosaurs – Tunguska was the only one of its kind. 39, the most dangerous asteroid event in history.
The images broken by Hubble, the asteroid tails appeared as white streaks that look like curved streaks, an effect caused by parallax. In astronomy, parallax is an effect of observation where the apparent position of an object seems to be different according to different lines of sight. Basically, while Hubble was circling Earth and taking multiple images of the galaxy, asteroids appeared to be moving relative to background stars and galaxies
Hubble Galaxy Abell 370 seen by Hubble Space Telescope in the final observations of Frontier Fields. Credit: NASA / ESA / HFF
The clean movement of asteroids along their orbits and other contributing factors has also led to their streaked appearance. While white streaks have been identified as tails of asteroids, blue streaks are distorted images of distant galaxies behind the bunch. This effect is known as gravitational lenses, where the light of distant objects is distorted and amplified by the presence of an intervening object.
In this case, the intervening object whose gravitational force amplified the light of background galaxies was Abell 370. The more distant galaxies are too far away for Hubble to directly track, d & # 39; 39, where the reason why astronomers use this technique to study objects farthest from the Universe. But while the blue streaks were expected, the white streaks caused by the asteroids completely surprised the scientists!
This year, the European Space Agency (ESA) co-hosts a live webcast with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) interviews, news on some of the latest research on asteroids and a discussion of what killed the dinosaurs. You can watch this event tomorrow from 13:00 CEST (11:00 UST / 04:00 PST) by going to ESA's Asteroid Day web page
Readings Additional: ESA
Matt Williams is the curator of the Universe Today's Guide to Space. He is also an independent writer, science fiction writer and Taekwon-Do instructor. He lives with his family on Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia.
Abell 370, Asteroids, Featured, Hubble Deep Field, Hubble Space Telescope, Asteroids Near the Earth
