Asteroids: School Students Make 11 New Discoveries

A team of school students and teachers has discovered 11 small astronomical objects in our solar system, including one provisionally recognized by a NASA-backed program as a main belt asteroid (MBA).

The team, from Dyal Singh Public School in Karnal, northern India, was participating in an initiative known as the International Astronomical Search Collaboration when it made the discoveries, the Hindustan Times reported.

The IASC is a program launched in 2006 that provides high-quality astronomical data to citizen scientists around the world at no cost. These citizen scientists, which include teams from schools (elementary through college) and community groups around the world, are then able to make original discoveries of astronomical objects.

The data the program uses is collected by telescopes located in Hawaii and elsewhere that continuously scan the sky in search of minor astronomical objects.

Of the 11 solar system objects uncovered by the team of students and teachers at Dyal Singh Public School, the IASC has recognized one as a provisional MBA discovery.

Diksha, a student at the school, spotted the object in data provided by the Pan-STARRS telescope located at Haleakala Observatory.

Newsweek has contacted the Dyal Singh Public School and the IASC for comment via email.

"The International Astronomical Search Collaboration project distributes fresh time-lapse images of the sky from these telescopes along with free software, and invites participants to hunt in the images for moving objects," said a description of the program on NASA's website.

The vast majority of finds that the program has identified are represented by asteroids. These objects might be MBAs, near-Earth objects (NEOs), or trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).

MBAs are asteroids that orbit the sun within the asteroid belt, a region located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, about 2.1 to 3.3 astronomical units (roughly 195 to 307 million miles) from our star.

These asteroids vary widely in size, from tiny pebbles to large bodies, such as Ceres—the largest asteroid and a dwarf planet—which has an average diameter of about 590 miles. The main belt contains millions of asteroids, thought to be remnants from the early solar system that never coalesced into a planet because of Jupiter's strong gravitational influence.

NEOs are small solar system bodies whose orbits around the sun bring them within 1.3 astronomical units (about 120 million miles) of our star, meaning they can come close to or cross Earth's orbit. The vast majority of known NEOs are asteroids, but a fraction of 1 percent is represented by comets.

TNOs are icy celestial bodies that orbit the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune at distances greater than 30 astronomical units (about 2.8 billion miles). They include objects in the Kuiper Belt, such as Pluto and Eris, and more distant regions, such as the scattered disk and the Oort cloud. TNOs are thought to be remnants from the early solar system.

Since launching in 2006, the IASC has made thousands of provisional asteroid discoveries, dozens of which have been numbered and placed in the world's official minor bodies catalog maintained by the International Astronomical Union.

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