Researchers just found more than 1,000 new solar system objects hiding in plain sight

More than 1,000 never-before-seen space rocks have been discovered in the solar system after secretly photobombing images of the cosmos for decades. A combination of artificial intelligence and citizen scientists helped uncover the asteroids hiding in archival photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, a new study shows. 

Our cosmic neighborhood is littered with asteroids. Scientists have already discovered more than 1.3 million of the space rocks, most of which lie in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to NASA. There are likely hundreds of thousands if not millions more asteroids waiting to be discovered. However, these remaining space rocks are likely the smallest and therefore faintest bodies in the solar system, which makes them very hard to spot.     

In the new study, published March 15 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers highlighted 1,031 previously uncategorized asteroids from archival Hubble data. They were identified by artificial intelligence (AI) that was trained by thousands of citizen scientists to spot faint streaks of light left behind by the tiny space rocks.

"We were surprised to see such a large number of candidate objects," study lead author Pablo García-Martín, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain, said in a statement. 

Although these asteroids were discovered randomly, their projected orbits suggest that most of them belong to a single population within the asteroid belt, which makes them even more valuable to researchers. 

"There was some hint that this population existed, but now we are confirming it," García-Martín said. "This is important for providing insights into the evolutionary models of our solar system."

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