"Hubble's Search for Small Main Belt Asteroids"

Astronomers used archived images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to identify 1,701 asteroid trails, with 1,031 of them previously uncatalogued, including about 400 below 1 kilometer in size. Citizen scientists and a machine learning algorithm were crucial in this effort. The findings provide new insights into the formation and evolution of the asteroid belt, supporting the idea that small asteroids are fragments of larger ones that have collided and broken apart over billions of years. The project will continue to explore the properties of these asteroids and their orbits.