The Hubble Space Telescope has a history of snapping the most eye-catching images of the cosmos. It not only stares into the distant bodies it is spotlighting on, it also observes things that get into its visual field, such as asteroids. A fresh glance at a 2005 Hubble picture of the crustacean-shaped Crab Nebula displayed an arcing asteroid tail photo-bombing the backdrop.
The cleverly improved picture fell out through the Hubble Asteroid Hunter citizen-scientist project via the ESA (European Space Agency). The citizen-scientists gazed through the Hubble image archive in the hunt for asteroid tails. In a release, ESA said, “Being acquainted with the time and date when the Hubble pictures were captured, they can utilize the paths marked in the images to conjecture velocities and positions of asteroids. This implies they can find out the orbits and potential trajectories of recognized and earlier unidentified asteroids with higher precision.”
The space rock was spotted by Melina Thévenot, a volunteer asteroid hunter, in the Crab Nebula’s picture and then processed it to emphasize the path of the asteroid. Pulling out old pictures for asteroid data will be helpful for researchers who are examining near-Earth objects (NEOs) that can probably dangerous for Earth. ESA intends to soon release a new set of pictures to the Hubble project, so there would be a chance to unite with the 1,900 participants and be an asteroid hunter.
Likewise, the Hubble telescope has recently snapped an image of one more galaxy, to be specific, a spiral galaxy. Dubbed NGC 3717, the galaxy is situated about 60 million light-years far-off, in the constellation Hydra. Sir John Herschel has discovered this constellation in 1834. Hydra is the biggest of the 88 present constellations and gauges 1303 square degrees. Also, it is the longest at more than 100 degrees. Generally, it embodied as a water snake and is situated in the southern hemisphere.
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