Visualization of Asteroids from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

universetoday.com ^ | February 22, 2014 | Nancy Atkinson on

[BenLurkin]

In 2008, a group of astronomers led by Alex Parker did a study of the size distribution of asteroid families using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Asteroid families often have distinctive optical colors, the team said, and they were able to offer an improved way to separate out the family members into their colors. This resultant animation put together just this week by Parker shows the orbital motions of over 100,000 asteroids, with colors illustrating the compositional diversity and relative sizes of the asteroids.

All main-belt asteroids and Trojan asteroids with orbits known to high precision are shown in the video and the animation is rendered with a timestep of 3 days. Via Twitter, Parker said this animation took — from start to finish — 20 hours to render on 8 CPUs.

[cripplecreek]

You haven’t seen the way the moon looks at us when our backs are turned.

[Windflier]

Thanks for the ping, Dave. I was just discussing the asteroids with my 9 year old.

[BreezyDog]