Old Data & New Discoveries: How 'THOR & Computational Astronomy' Discovered 27,500 Asteroids

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.

Find out more about the Asteroid Institute Here:

Follow me on Twitter for more updates:

I have a discord server where I regularly turn up:

If you really like what I do you can support me directly through Patreon

[gentrywalker]

my favorite asteroid is 33434 scottmanley

[rickj]

I have a friend who is an astronomer, and has never looked through a telescope for his work. He spends all of his time dealing with data. From what he has told me, most astronomers these days don't look though telescopes anymore.

[WorldFactions]

As someone who is a software engineer, I would love a small sample set of like 6 photos to try to write software to track asteroids efficiently. IMO this is a great programming challenge that many developers would be interested in jumping on.

If you really want to see success, find 6 samples and make it a programming challenge. We can build out a benchmark suite to find the fastest way to perform the calculations.

[mattp]

I've been watching you for a few years and I never knew that old asteroid discovery animation was done by you. Super cool, that's an internet classic.

[ncdavelife]

6:00 _"imagine you take a picture of some section of the sky and you find like a thousand points in there that aren't stars, and then you take the same picture couple of days later and you see about a thousand points. Which ones go to which ones? It's complicated! There's like a _*_million possible combinations, _*_ not including the ones that are coming in from outside the frame and the ones that have left the frame."_

Actually, it's a *_lot more than a million, _* Scott. Even if you knew that the 1000 objects in each frame were the same 1000 objects, the number of possible mappings would be 1000!, which is a 2568-digit number.

[renerpho]

Nice shout-out to the "computational astronomy" folks.
Together with David Rankin and Bill Gray, I've been looking for unidentified objects in the Minor Planet Center's "Isolated Tracklets File" since 2020. It is the dataset where the MPC puts all observations of asteroids that don't belong to known objects. We have found over 15, 000 links so far, and discovered about a dozen Near Earth asteroids this way.

[ryanspaceYT]

It will always impress me how much we have discovered in the last 50 years, we have gone from not knowing a lot really to having thousands of asteroids and meteors cataloged

[benGman]

I like how the visuals look like a torch shining in the night

[Crackers]

The ease of access to huge amounts of archival data these days is incredible. I just finished up my undergrad final project and was able to find all sky photometric data all the way from the UV to the FIR, access to this data really helps in fields when it's simply not possible to request the observing times needed to do some specific research

[bill]

Hey Scott.. Both you and Sean Connery are Scottish so your voice doing "James Bond" is on par being authentic. Thanks for the video.

[slateslavens]

So is there a "Scott Munley" in Kerbal 2 yet?

I really hope he's flying safe.

[SocksWithSandals]

That was one of the most spectacular graphic renditions of big data I've ever seen.

[emiltonon]

Actually the grek suffix -oid stands for "similar to" and not "object", so asteroid literally means "similar to a star". Anyway, great video as always!

[grantwells]

My favorite YouTuber posting on my birthday! :) Awesome stuff Scott ☄️

[Richardincancale]

I used to chat to a lady waiting with me to pick up her kids from primary school who I eventually learned had an asteroid named after her as she has discovered it! Dead impressed!

[paulbugnacki]

Right! Dig into the data that we have with tools available to us citizen scientists. Super fascinating.

[dorsk]

I'm surprised they haven't done something like SETI did with their "screen saver". I think finding asteroids that might hit Earth is more pressing that finding E.T.

[iamsandrewsmith]

An old friend of mine is a statistician and an amateur astronomer. He helped develop some statistical models for dark matter distribution (sorry, I don't have a citation!). He also taught some professional astronomers to actually look at the sky through a telescope -- none of them had ever actually looked through an eyepiece before!

[istvansipos]

- What time is it, James?
- It's two. Half past two.

[ThatOpalGuy]

baby steps towards the EXPANSE. love it!