We ’ve all been there , ready to take the perfect image , when someone wonders across the field of view of view . You ’d cogitate being located beyond the Earth ’s air would make the Hubble Space scope resistant to such thwarting , but you ’d be incorrect . When NASA ’s flagship scope took epic images of removed extragalactic nebula , some asteroid got in the way .
Any astronomical image carry the opening of including asteroids zinging across the field of view , but in most cases , the risk is pretty low . However , when the destination is to capture exceptionally feeble objects , astronomers increase the time over which the paradigm is taken . This raises the chance of an asteroid making its presence known .
The images are from theFrontier Fieldsproject to examine patches of the sky where immense clump of galaxies creategravitational lenses , enable us to capture more upstage galaxy than we could otherwise see . These have been counterpoint with random field that do n’t have clusters gravid enough to create gravitative lenses . The task has already found themost distantgalaxy ever observed .
Both area , like the famousHubble Deep Fields , have been given super long photograph times , as Hubble has no peril of cloud or light pollution creeping in to deflower the image . The exposures are not have all at once , however . Instead , they involve aggregate the light collected over many periods . Hubble is devote 630 hours of its precious time to the six Frontier Fields and six dominance areas .
This explains why some asteroid paths see in the figure of speech await similar – they ’re in reality the same asteroid whose path has been replicated by the unconscious process of commingle multiple images . The 20 lines in the top image were made by just seven asteroid , of which five were previously unsung objects . On average these asteroid are 250 million kilometers ( 160 million mile ) forth – while the extragalactic nebula are hundreds of trillion of idle years aside . The paths seem curve because Hubble revolve the Earth . The combination of the asteroids ' movement through the Solar System , and Hubble ’s own passageway around the Earth , make a coulomb or S - shape route .
The epitome below contain Abell 370 , one of the clustering large enough to make a powerful gravitational lens system . It has 22 asteroid line from five antecedently unknown asteroid . It also includes one ( thicker ) line which , rather than being an asteroid , is a very distant galaxy whose condition has been distort by the gravitational lens system .
The most distant galaxies in these images wait red , because they are moving away from us so rapidly theDoppler shiftis visible to the naked center .
