Tag Archive for 'UGC 12158' | Sci.News

This Hubble 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. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Pablo García Martín, UAM / Joseph DePasquale, STScI / Alex Filippenko, UC Berkeley.

Astronomers Discover 454 New Asteroids in Main Belt

Apr 19, 2024 by News Staff

A set of 632 main-belt asteroids (178 previously known and 454 unknown objects) has been identified in the archival images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space...