Old Data & New Discoveries: How 'THOR & Computational Astronomy' Discovered 27,500 Asteroids
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Discovering an asteroid involves more than just taking a photo of a space rock, it's required to compute the orbit of the object and that requires multiple images over time and lots of math. Once you have an orbit your can figure out where it will be in the future and the past, and importantly, determine that it's not the same as and of the million other asteroids already known.
In recent years new cloud computer resources and software have enabled scientists at the Asteroid Institiute to explore old data and find new discoveries, specifically 27,500 asteroids were found in images from the Dark Energy Survey which had primarily been looking at supernovae.
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