File:Wayward Asteroid Photobombs Hubble Snapshot of Galaxy UGC 12158 (2024-014).png

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Captions

Captions

This Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it.

Summary[edit]

Description
English: This Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158 looks like someone took a white marking pen to it. In reality it is a combination of time exposures of a foreground asteroid moving through Hubble's field-of-view, photobombing the observation of the galaxy. Several exposures of the galaxy were taken, what is evidence in the dashed pattern.

The asteroid appears as a curved trail due to parallax: because Hubble is not stationary, but orbiting Earth, and this gives the illusion that the faint asteroid is swimming along a curved trajectory. The uncharted asteroid is in inside the asteroid belt in our solar system, and hence is 10 trillion times closer to Hubble than the background galaxy. Rather than a nuisance, this type of data are useful to astronomers for doing a census of the asteroid population in our solar system. NASA, ESA, Pablo García Martín (UAM) Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley)
Date 18 April 2024 (upload date)
Source Wayward Asteroid Photobombs Hubble Snapshot of Galaxy UGC 12158
Author Image: NASA, ESA, Pablo García Martín (UAM) Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) Acknowledgment Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley)
Other versions
Keywords
InfoField
Solar System; Galaxies; Asteroids; Small Solar System Bodies; Spiral Galaxies

Licensing[edit]

Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org.
For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

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