Join the Hunt: NASA Volunteers Find 15 Rare “Active Asteroids”

NASA’s project unveils fifteen active asteroids, providing insights into the solar system’s origins and future space exploration potential.

Some extraordinary asteroids have “activity”—comet-like tails or envelopes of gas and dust. NASA’s Active Asteroids project announced the discovery of activity on fifteen asteroids, challenging conventional wisdom about the solar system.

To find these fifteen rare objects, more than 8000 volunteers combed through 430,000 images from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile. A paper about the results, now published in the Astronomical Journal, includes nine volunteers among the co-authors.