Asteroid Discovery From 1980 - 2010

Video Created by Scott Manley, this is a view of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.
The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
Earth Crossers are Red
Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow
All Others are Green

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

The scale of the video at 1080P resolution is roughly 1million kilometers per pixel, and each second of video corresponds to 60 days.

Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates show no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects, scientific estimates suggest that there are about a billion asteroids larger than 100metres (about the size of a football field) .

Orbital elements were taken from the 'astorb.dat' data created by Ted Bowell and associates at ftp://ftp.lowell.edu/pub/elgb/astorb.htm­l

Music is 'Transgenic' by Trifonic: http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Trifo... - they're awesome guys, give them some love.

Check out todays asteroid map at http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map....
Quite a few journalists, bloggers and tweeters are attributing this to NASA or Arecibo Observatory - while they do fine work they had nothing to do with this. If you write a story you can credit it to Scott Manley.

If you are needing a higher quality video or images for a specific purposes - education, news or just eye candy I can supply them on a case by case basis.

Thanks for the Interest!
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• Category

  Science & Technology

[Elsuntan]

They follow a predictable orbit that can be tracked with a bit of math. Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

[MegaDman98]

i came here from NERD 3

[acommunityofhermits]

Notice how they tend to be in a line directly away from the sun as seen from earth? Some astronomer was pointing a telescope up into the night sky during that part of the year and taking detailed data, then writes a paper and it gets published.

[Hanro Lareman]

1990 (nothing much)

1999 (something is happening)

2005 (were did all the green come from?)

2010 (were did the exstra lightning come from?)

[schchen2000]

Hello Scott,  I would like to make a special request, if you don't mind, to have a copy of the video as it's nicely done and I would like to have it on my laptop as a screensaver. Many thanks.

[t1mmy13]

We are so small.

[Dave Gardiner]

this just shows how little we actually know about our own solar system. there are most likely hundreds of thousands if not millions of object in orbit around the sun in regions such as the kupier belt and farther that we don't know exist. now add in the equation the impossible to visualize number of solar systems in our galaxy, the even bigger number of galaxies contained in the observable universe, and the hugeness of the actual universe. We have so much to learn and so little time.

[pontus515]

How come there's some extremely concentrated discoveries in the asteroid belts?

[EnterElysium]

How do those asteroids that appear in be in a near-Jupiter orbit not get thrown around by Jupiter's SOI?

[Scott Manley]

Pretty much, things tend to remain on the same orbit, unless they have close encounters with planets, collisions might happen but are rare. Also object near resonance will experience changes in their orbits, but we can predict those in the long term by integrating the orbit.

[duzanz]

I'd imagine if an a object isn't where it is supposed to be there is some sort of way to figure out where it went.

Then again the number of objects effected by this would be so small it would be negligible when it comes to counting them.

[Elsuntan]

In practice there has to be some variables like that, it is a good point. Guessing after scan the objects are placed on rails like the planets in Kerbal Space Program, but maybe Mr. Manley could chime in on how that is updated.