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Space

Astronomers have just found more than half a million new asteroids

By Leah Crane

20 August 2021

2A7HPG2 asteroid belt, debris in the solar system

We now know about half a million more asteroids in the asteroid belt

dotted zebra/Alamy

A pair of astronomers have found and categorised half a million new asteroids lurking in old data. Figuring out exactly where these objects came from could be crucial to understanding the early solar system.

Alexey Sergeyev and Benoit Carry at Côte d’Azur University in France found the objects by sifting through images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This survey, which uses a telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, took images of …

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