Istafa Ali
Scientists have found about 27,500 asteroids that could be dangerous to Earth in the future.
They used advanced technology called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) to get more information from old space photos, according to the New York Post. This method helped them find thousands of new asteroids, more than the total found by all the world’s telescopes last year.
The New York Post mentioned that 100 of these asteroids are worrying because they will pass close to Earth’s orbit. Most of these asteroids are from the area between Mars and Jupiter.
Ed Lu, the head of the Asteroid Institute, told the New York Times that this method is a big change in how we can study space in the future.
Matthew Holman, a specialist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian, said in 2022 that having a complete map of the solar system is very important for science and protecting our planet.
The NYT said that the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) has over 412,000 pictures in its archives, showing 1.7 billion points of light.
Using Google Cloud, THOR found all the missed asteroids in just five weeks.
“The work of the Asteroid Institute is really important because astronomers are nearly at the limit of what they can find with current methods and telescopes,” said THOR co-creator Mario Jurić, a senior data science fellow.
Although none of these asteroids are expected to hit Earth, this new algorithm could help find dangerous asteroids and other space threats in the future.
