Thanks to a revolutionary technique based on advanced computerized image processing,astronomers have managed to detect,in photographs taken by the James webb Space Telescope,objects of a few tens of meters in diameter in the main asteroid belt,located between the orbit of Mars (about 230 million kilometers from the Sun) and that of Jupiter (about 780 million).
The best-known asteroids orbit in this asteroid belt. The belt is estimated to contain between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter and millions of smaller asteroids. Early in the history of the solar system, the gravity of the newborn Jupiter ended the formation of planetary bodies in this region and caused small bodies in that orbital belt to collide with each other, shattering into the asteroids we see today.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about 10 kilometers in diameter. Statistically, it is estimated that such a large star collides with Earth only on rare occasions, once every 100 million years or every 500 million. In contrast, much smaller asteroids, only several tens of meters, may collide with Earth more frequently, once every few years. It is known that these space rocks, measuring tens of meters, are more likely to escape from the main asteroid belt and migrate to areas closer to the Sun, some of them become close to the Earth and manage to get dangerously close to it. if they fall, these faster-than-bullet space rocks can devastate entire regions, as happened with the 1908 impact in Tunguska, Siberia, and the 2013 asteroid that crashed into the sky above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.
With their new technique, the international team composed of, among others, Julien de Wit and Artem Burdanov, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, and Emmanuel Jehin, from the University of Liège in Belgium, have managed to detect in the main asteroid belt 138 bodies with diameters of tens of meters, smaller than any other bodies detected there.
Artistic recreation of small asteroids. (Image: NASA JPL/Caltech)
Until now, the smallest detectable asteroids had to have a diameter of at least one kilometer. With the new technique it is possible to detect asteroids up to 10 meters in diameter in the main asteroid belt.
This result is of grate importance not only for astronomy but also for planetary defence. The technique will be of great help in identifying and tracking asteroids that may come dangerously close to Earth.
Of this first set of 138 detected bodies, researchers suspect that many may end up passing very close to earth.
De Wit and his colleagues present the technical details of their discovery of these 138 bodies, and the method used, in the academic journal Nature, under the title “JWST sighting of main-belt asteroids and meteorite source views.”
The James Webb Space telescope is the result of an international collaboration led by NASA,ESA and CSA,the US,European and Canadian space agencies,respectively. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)
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