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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my favorite asteroid is 33434 scottmanley
I knew someone would look it up. Too many followers for everyone to forget!
I hope it flies safe.
The most manly of asteroids.
There even more asteroids named after awesome science youtubers! (10003) Caryhuang --> carykh (16648) Hossi --> Sabine Hossenfelder (35419) Beckysmethurst --> Dr. Becky (42795) Derekmuller --> Veritasium (158092) Frasercain --> Fraser Cain / Universe Today
I propose renaming the asteroid 007 Scott Manley
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.
This remains me of the time I was working for one of the best US oceanographical institutions. More then once I needed to explain to people that I did not dive with the dolphins. What I did was sitting in the office writing and testing modeling code.
Super duper sad
Cool! So called data mining is great. Wish him many success! There ar many hiden treasures in all the data.
I could say the same! A lot of astronomy professors at my university deal with computation and machine learning on old telescope data rather than using telescopes directly.
@@arctic_haze I can somehow relate to this, as I also don't dive with dolphins, and I don't even have a job
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.
The data is out there, for free.
@@scottmanley So are basic elements needed for research in battery technology, they are in the dirt of your backyard, just get them and make some experiments! This is a problem of having a single place where you have list of sources, the exact ones, example solutions, example data sets with instructions how they were made. More people would be interested in doing this stuff if they had something of a starting guide. I don't even know what to google to get started.
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.
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
Our knowledge has been on an exponentially increasing rate for a long time. It's not (merely) use of the technology we currently have pushing it, it's having the base of knowledge to work from. Of course, it increased a lot when our standard of living increased enough to have actual leisure time along with protection enough to pursue pure research, and even then it was basically quirky rich guys for the longest time. The thing I worry about is, our 'best' storage medium right now has a maximum lifespan of about 10 years (physical hard drives) and even then they only really last that long if they're filled then stored un-powered. We need something cheap and permanent! Like those data storage in crystal stories that come up every once in a while.
I like how the visuals look like a torch shining in the night
Note that the “torch” is always pointing away from the earth in the direction away from the sun, the easiest area to find objects at any given time.
@benGman69 : this is exactly what I came here to say too. Like a beam sweeping out into the dark.....😊
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!
Looked for a comment that said this before I posted the same thing. Aster = Star. -oid = like. That's why a 'factoid' is not a 'small fact' but in fact a statement that seems like a fact, but isn't.
Particularly, the Greek word meant "having the form of" or "appears like". So not implying it is actually like the other thing in nature, just looks like it.
In English usage, "oid" generally means something similar to, or an object similar to. The suffix "oid" makes the word a noun, not an adjective. E.g., "asteroid" does not mean similar to a star, but a thing that is similar to a star. A more familiar example: An opioid is a substance that is similar to opium.
@@beenaplumber8379 Similar is both an adjective and a noun, a similar is something that is like something else. The OED has the noun similar defined as "A thing or person similar to or resembling another; a counterpart; the like or equivalent of someone or something." Asteroid and opioid are also both adjectives and nouns. An opioid drug is one similar to to poppies. Asteroid is only used as an adjective in zoology.
@@pattheplanter Yep, English is complicated like that. Remember too that nouns can be used as adjectives, like microphone stand - a stand on which a microphone is placed, or guitar amplifier - an amplifier used with a guitar. (I'm a musician, and I'm just looking around my room.) Ethernet cables, picture frames, a coffee mug - there are tons of examples. "Opioid" is similar. It's implied to mean an opioid-class drug (still a noun), but it's used as an adjective when referring to opioid drugs. (That's actually a redundant usage. If something is an opioid, it is by definition a drug.) There's also hemorrhoids, steroids, and androids - all nouns that can be repurposed as adjectives. My point is that Scott wasn't wrong to say "oid" means an object *in this usage* (making the word a noun), though he missed the qualifier "similar" - an object similar to the root word. An object similar to an aster is an asteroid.
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.
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.
sup renerpho!
Hi Renerpho, I'm here too!
@@aperson1 Hi Sam :)
That was one of the most spectacular graphic renditions of big data I've ever seen.
Well said!
Hey Scott.. Both you and Sean Connery are Scottish so your voice doing "James Bond" is on par being authentic. Thanks for the video.
My thought too! An English accent for Bond is just wrong.
Now I'm imagining Scott Manley as James Bond.
@@benjaminhanke79 No Mr Bond! I expect you to fly safe!
I thought Sean Connery was a Russian submarine captain!? (... or an immortal Spanish knight. I can never remember ...)
@@secularmonk5176 An... Immortal Soviet Spanish Submarine Swordsman?
So is there a "Scott Munley" in Kerbal 2 yet? I really hope he's flying safe.
"Couldn't name asteroids after a fictional character" "First asteroid is Ceres"... "God of agriculture" 🧐
In taxonomic categorization as we currently know it, religion is distinctly different than and not to be confused with fiction. I do get where you're coming from, as an atheist most of it seems all made up (just it was imagined long, long ago), but I'm not the one making the rules and everyone's going to be angry if we change the categorization criteria now.
For around 50 years, Ceres was also considered a planet. Then it was "demoted" to asteroid and in 2006 "promoted" to a dwarf planet.
@@44R0Ndin True but the 19th century astronomers were mostly Christian and for them Ceres was equally made up as for an atheist.
Agriculture is real, can confirm. I lived on a farm. ;)
@@ArathirCz "yay Ceres!" Pluto waves a small flag with "I'm a dwarf planet too..." printed on it and grimaces a 'smile' the way only the god of the underworld can.
My favorite KZheadr posting on my birthday! :) Awesome stuff Scott ☄️
Happy Birthday and all the best 🎉!
Happy Birthday and congrats 🎉
(Why are the Post gone? It was: Happy Birthday and congratulations only?)
Happy Birthday and another fine orbit!
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
Future homes for beltalowda !
Oi rockhoppa!
- What time is it, James? - It's two. Half past two.
Fantastic indeed! Thanks, Scott! 😊 Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Brilliant vid! Live that message 🙌
Yep we made use of your visualisation for the OU course S250, thanks!
I was unaware. Thank you for your contribution to the sciences, sir.
baby steps towards the EXPANSE. love it!
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!
That does not exist, normally you never name an asteroid you discover for yourself. The only way to have something you discovered named after you is if you discovered a comet. Not an asteroid.
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.
They did. It's called asteroids@home.
The real question is are there any asteroids named things like James Holden, or Amos Burton, or Chrisjen Avasarala?
There is one named (33434) Scottmanley
❤
Surely Marco should be the one with rocks named after him, sa sa?
Right! Dig into the data that we have with tools available to us citizen scientists. Super fascinating.
It's astonishing how close Atari came in 1979 with their Asteroids simulation system.
I did a lot of work on that simulation before I realized we are doomed and turned to alcohol.
@@deltalima6703 They promised that project would reveal the meaning of life in the universe. Your work on the system was the breakthrough which fulfilled that promise.
It's like the movie Last Starfighter: the game was a test by a secret agency that protects the planet from asteroids, and the best gamers were chosen to do it for real.
Don't hit the Hyperspace button.
This was great! Thanks!!
That's probably a research team that have at least 27,500 new friends 'suggesting' names for those asteroids.
Hi Scott. This was an especially cool episode and the animation was particularly interesting. It got me wondering if we're tracking enough objects in the asteroid belt with enough precision to determine if there are density waves propagating through it and if so what might be driving the density waves--Jupiter for example.
great stuff data ferrets!
Judging by that animation, I am actually *not* flying particularly safe. :-0
Scott spit mad fire! 🔥☄️
Excellent mentorship. I wonder the nearest miss distances for the Voyager probes.
Finally, we get a sequel to the legendary video! All we need now is Interstellar Quest Season 2...
Hi Scott! Fly safe!
Scott, that was amazing. Just watching the model on the screen was fascinating as the asteroids formed into clumps and bars across the bands between Mars and Jupiter. And the scary number of dots that hover around Mars and the Earth!
Fascinating!
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!
"People working with the asstitu-" Nice slip there, Scott 😀
Setting dataviz to Trifonic roped me in.
Beautiful visualization. What is the story behind the 'searchlight beams' illuminating the asteroid cloud periodically?
I have vague memories of him doing an explainer video about that. Also related to the T-shaped beams I think. Can’t find it now though. Argh.
Watch this on your biggest high res screen! Fantastic and kind of terrifying visualization.
Wow. Scott Manley, i had no idea that you were the one who made this animation of the tracked asteroids. I was watching it quite often over the years and saw it getting longer and longer over time and more asteroids were added each year. This is so fascinating! Is there any estimation about how big these objects are? Like 10m, 100? 1km, 10? What's the range, and what is the smallest size that has been found and tracked by observing from earth? And Kudos!
A minor error seems to have crept in. When Ceres was discovered, it was thought to be another planet, and was treated as such. However, when Pallas, Juno and a handful of others were discovered with orbits in the same general region of the solar system, it was judged that they couldn't all be planets. And the term asteroid was coined because most of them were just points of light in all but the very best telescopes.
without asteroid strikes it is very unlikely that Scott would be making this video today. so...who are WE to prevent the next dominant life form from evolving?
We are already actively consuming the planet to the point where the next dominant life form won't have enough crude oil or natural gas to hope to develop a society wholly based on those resources. The next dominant life form will be lucky to have two sticks to rub together on daily basis.
Think of asteroids as nature’s graduation test.
@@CantankerousDave Also climate change.
@@General12thyeah but that’s more of not cleaning your room until you can’t see the floor.
Would love to see these little cubesats that people keep putting up have outward looking cameras. The resolution would not need to be crazy high, because you could use computers to use multiple low resolution images into very high quality 3d images. Plus being outside the vast majority of the atmosphere would help with clarity as well. Starlink, I'm looking at you! ^-^
Love you scott
Nice!
Video #4 of asking for a video on the topic of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, possible Uranus orbiter mission, and the plutonium shortage
There have been several initiatives to utilise personal computers, when not otherwise utilised, to collectively analyse the phenomenal amount of data collected over the years. perhaps this could be expanded to cover other investigations that an individual might like to involve themselves in..
Making me feel old. I remember that first video.
I’m not clicking away until I hear “fly safe” and the outro beat finish with the 4 slaps
To be honest, i think the first video of you i came across was Where Sky taught you how to play Spreadsheets in Space... I also fondly remember a time with Jebediah and "check your staging!" I do wonder at times if the Kerbal family get to relive their glory days with Mr Manley...
Fascinating and inspiring. Reminds me of the lofty goals of SETI@home. If only we had enough compute, we could decode the heavens.
The first asteroid/minor planet discovered with Gauss's method was Ceres!
0:00 I'm pretty sure I saw this used on the discovery channel at some points too.
One of the authors of the paper went to university with me! Cool!
You can imagine my surprise when I learned a kid I went to high school with is the Principal Investigator for the Event Horizon Telescope... Dr. Shep Doeleman. I used to help his dad grade math papers (he was a math teacher and more importantly, the computer lab coordinator. I lived in the computer lab back in the 80s).
Cool, im bit younger, my coleague ended up in that research team, I ended up building first satellite for our country, soon to be launched on Transporter 12! So we kinda both ended in space themed business!
Zooniverse Galaxy Zoo - citizen science is a whole bunch of space projects. Basically anyone with a computer can help classify data. Help find; Black Holes, Galaxies, Variable Stars, Sunspots, Gravity Waves, and Exoplanets... These are just a few of the current projects.
Very humble of you not to even mention asteroid Scott Manley
3:52 👈 😉
This is similar to how radar generates tracks, just far more slowly and with far higher degrees of ambiguity.
very cool
Astronomy data mining. Seriously cool! 🖖🖖🖖
Several years ago my roof ovservatory got broken in and almost everything got stolen. If one day I would find out who did it, and after I'm even with him I would like to add a small epytaphy on his grave. "This fine gentleman got me working on real astronomical data."
Computational Astronomy sounds like a tool that will be needed for AstroNavigation Modeling on Starship and beyond.
I have a question, and it might be difficult to answer. How many of these asteroids which have been detected have been sorted into the various "stony/carbonaceous/metallic" categories? Is there a way to apply a computer to existing data sets to speed up this process? If new data is absolutely required to categorize such asteroids, what data would that be, what type of instrument would be the best to collect that data, and what is the minimal time period over which it would be acceptable to collect this data? Idea here is to categorize as many of these asteroids as possible as quickly as possible, in order to better build a "mineral assay" type of study so that we can more easily select ideal candidates that are 1. not of scientific interest, and 2. rich in minerals useful to build spacecraft using on-orbit mineral refining and processing techniques. In other words, the asteroid belt is basically an extremely dispersed but also incredibly massive and rich mineral deposit, and I want to figure out which asteroids are not scientifically important but still contain enough easily processed minerals to make it worthwhile to bring them into Earth orbit (perhaps with the help of the Moon) for construction of a space station and/or shipyard to facilitate the more intensive and manned exploration of the Solar System as a whole. I know the path from "floating space rocks" to "finished spaceships" doesn't exist right now. But it is something I have wanted to see since I was made aware that metallic-type asteroids exist.
Damn it, Scott! I'll get to it sometime!! Jokes aside, Gaia, Euclid, DESI data are just too juicy for universities to hog! And when LISA gets going the real fun will begin
🤔 a thousand points in the sky... just connect the dotts 😂😂😂 got you 👌👍🏼
A small nitpick, the word asteroid is αστεροειδής that splits to αστέρο-ειδης (αστέρι+ είδος are the words combined) with the left side meaning star and the right side meaning object that shares properties of the first object, hence why the suffix -oid means of similar nature to the root word
The real question is, can we use this data to track down planet 9?
Post this comment and hours later get a planet 9 video from Anton ... Coincidence?
4:08 Asteroid almost called "Scott Manley FU" 🤣🤣
5:09 I barely graduated high school and somehow managed to get a high school diploma without ever passing even an algebra class. I'm in my 40s now and I wish I could make any sense of this screen. I can't even tell you what kind of math it is. My best guess would be trigonometry...? Is that right? It is probably too late for me but I will make sure my niece and nephew don't give up on math like I did.
At 3:39, would’ve been an interesting alternative plot for “Moonraker”…
Now THIS is how I expected the Internet to be used, back in the late '80s
consider how unstable astroid orbit can be, how offen should it's orbit be reverified?
The first step in searching an image for new asteroids is identifying all of the known objects. Then you can study the unknown dots. If a known object is slightly out of place, then you know something interesting is going on.
A very basic thought: everything in the universe is moving, nothing is standing still.........never thought of that before. Another thought: when I am searching through a list to find something ( eg looking through my favourites or looking through my passwords list), I use visual patterns to find things I use regularly, its makes it very fast to find something, maybe that could be applied to searching through data to quicken the search if doing the same thing over and over.........just some thoughts.
Sings: Look at this photograph Every time I do, I do the Math. Is that an asteroid, Ted And what time did we get to bed? And this is where I look up I think Jupiter kicked the rocks right up I never knew we'd ever went without The new space telescopes are coming out...
I miss you scott❤
Mr Manley, Given the subject of this video I am wondering if you could offer some insight on something. I witnessed the reentry of some spacecraft on Jan 2nd at 750pm PST from San Diego county. Approximately 32.8N, 116.5W. It was visible when facing roughly south and went from west to east. It appeared to begin glowing orange, then stopped glowing for a short bit and when to got more directly above my position it grew a rather spectacular trailing cone of gasses. I have found many sites that track space debris and found a couple of things that seem to have entered atmosphere in that time frame (spacebeanz 18 possibly) but I don’t know how to convert the tracking data to a visual representation. I also have had no luck getting assistance when contacting the administrators of some of the various sites. Help me Mr Manley, you’re my only hope.
How do you know it was a reentering spacecraft, not a lump of rock or other natural object? A comet-like object, or even a metallic object, would likely trail gasses too.
@@Mark_Bridges I’ve seen rocks and metals reenter. It was not that. It also didn’t trail any gas clouds until after its bright orange initial contact with the atmosphere. It also seemed to “skip” once during that initial atmospheric contact. You are correct, and I admit, that I cannot say for certain what it was. That said, as an astrophotographer I have spent a LOT of time watching the skies. I have seen plenty of objects entering the atmosphere and this was wholly different in every way.
They won't name an asteroid after Darth Vader though because he disrespects them: "Asteroids do not concern me..."
Didn’t you do an explainer video about which telescopes and projects identified which batches of asteroids? Something to do with the T-shaped discovery pattern for a couple years?
Go Scott, go! Where's my computer!
That is very true about repurposing old data to make new discoveries. I recently attended a presentation by Dr. John Hood, who used radio telescope CMB data to track the variability of galactic nuclei quasars and blazars over time.
What's being shown from 5:55 : why's it planar, & what are the 'spokes'? *& hi-density areas that appear from 6:40.
Big ball of light in the middle is the Sun. Pale track close to it is that of Mercury. Pinking track outside that is the orbit of Venus. Sky-blue track initially from bottom of screen and outside orbit of Venus is orbit of Earth. Red track outside Earth is Mars. Green tracks are tracks of individual asteroids. White flashes among the asteroids are new discoveries, fading through bright green to the same green as the others. They're away from the Sun each time, because it's a lot easier to spot the sunlit side of an asteroid, and in groups like that because those are the fields of view of telescopes "staring" in that direction.
Any chance of an updated version of the animation showing the 27k new asteroids?
Hey Scott... Nice asteroid. 😎 _1999 FU!_
Astronomer Jim Gibson named asteroid Mr Spock for his cat (which had pointy ears). At the origin you were supposed to name an asteroid for a person who had helped somehow the progress in astronomy. And Jim named it for his cat, because it was very often with him while observing, and "had been more useful in that that the observatory's administration".... Apollo asteroid 4257 Ubasti is also somehow related to a cat. Jean Mueller discovered it at Palomar Observatory, and meant to name one of her asteroids after her cat named Pepper cat who had recently passed away. This was rejected by the WGSBN (working group on small body nomenclature) so she named the asteroid Ubasti, the egyptian god normally represented like a cat, in memory of her animal companion.
She referred to WGSBN as "ubasti nastards" from that point on.
how can i download such data. Do you have some links(…)
Space is very big, and very nearly empty, but not empty enough.
What a time to be alive.
So, if we weren't allowed to name asteroids after fictional characters, why was it acceptable to name the first one Ceres? Isn't our entire naming convention based on naming celestial objects after fictional characters?
Sssshhhhh don’t confuse their arbitrary rules.
I suppose that greek gods and TV characters are not in the same category.
There's loads of asteroids named after fictional characters, albeit from works that are either really famous, historical, or astronomy-related. There's asteroid (5048) Moriarty, named after the Sherlock Holmes character, there's (5635) Cole named after the character from the book "Cole of Spyglass Mountain", there's (418532) Saruman from The Lord of the Rings, and there's (274020) Skywalker named after Luke and Anakin from Star Wars!
At the time of discovery (in 1801 CE) Ceres was considered to be a planet and followed existing naming conventions based on the old Roman pantheon. It took about 65 years to reclassify it as an asteroid, when the number of discovered asteroids was still in the tens (most of which had also been named with similar conventions), at which point its name was well-established.
In the year 5000 we'll have celestial objects being named after the great ancient mythology. Baht Simsan, the prankster god. Leglass, a marksman of great prowess named for his great agility and fair face. Peek-chu, the servant of Zeus or possibly Thor, delivering lightning bolts upon foes.
I remember there was an effort to recover lunar images from tapes from a 60's orbiter that produced images better than the new LRO---seems like there are at least a couple of instances where we wasted money sending a new probe to get data we already had but forgot about.
Not true, the LOIRP project covered great images from before Apollo, but they were by no measure superior to LRO images because of their lower resolution.
@@scottmanley I thought someone did a side by side and concluded the old ones were better because of the films higher dynamic range
@@mikezagorsky That sounds like a preference, i.e., do you prefer higher resolution or better dynamic range in your images? Regardless, sounds like the best option would be to merge the two image sets.
it's interesting how earth is right at this weird dip where the asteroids on eccentric orbits cross it's plain and head back out. there didn't really seem to be many crossing much past earths orbit.
@09:47 Watching Jupiter "throw" a bunch of asteroids at Earth as it passes that large cluster on the upper right is frightening.
I wonder if the asteroid doing a flyby of the sun at 6:45 is Oumuamua, or if it's a random representation. It caught my attention as it didn't seem to be following a solar orbit like the rest of the objects.
Object "1999 FU" - nice!
What are the chances of these asteroids bumping into each other or external objects bumping into them that would alter their orbit and future observations of the same asteroids resulting in a new entry?
I cant believe he did an entire video about asteroids and didnt mention his own!
I can't believe you missed him showing it.
I mustache you a question, but I'm shaving it for later.😂😂😂😂 Say it Scott😊
685 thousand seven hundred and 31 asteroids found, in a roughly toroid cloud somewhere in the 10^26 cubic kilometre range. 10^20 km³ each. They're only a few million km apart? Space is a lot more crowded than I realised.
Agreed. And ironically everything is so mind-blowingly far apart. Its so hard to belive there is a whole universe, let alone the several weeks just to get to the moon. And Ive heard it takes about 2 light years just to see of end of our the solar system, which even then I think is smaller the average system. Just wild🤯!