IASC has since grown to 500 schools with 5,000 students participating each year in more than 70 countries on six continents. IASC (pronounced Isaac), now in its eighth year, was co-founded by Miller and Jeff Davis, an HSU student at the time and now alumnus, with just five schools from the United States participating. The students discovered the TNO with images downloaded in April from the Institute for Astronomy in Haleakala, Maui, which has the world’s largest scientific camera, a 7-degree field of vision and 1.4 billion pixels. The odd orbit suggests that it interacted with Neptune in the past, which disturbed its orbit into the shape that we see today,” said Miller. The TNO’s orbit is still being determined but the preliminary orbit indicates it swings in a distance of 33 AU from the Sun out to 97 AU. “To give a comparison of the distance of this object, Pluto sits at an average distance of 40 AU* from the sun. The newest discover is very different because it is at the furthest reaches of our Solar System, so far away said Miller that it would take about 562 Earth years for the TNO to go around the sun once. Many are boulders of rock about a quarter-mile across.” “They are two to four times as far from the Sun as the Earth. “Most of the discoveries are Main Belt asteroids, found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter,” said Miller. Discoveries of hundreds of previously unknown asteroids and even comets have been accrued and documented as a result of the program. Students use a software package to assist in the detection and measurement of the positions of asteroids and other near-Earth objects. Lemmon Sky Center (University of Arizona). Over the Internet, participating schools receive astronomical images taken only hours before from several telescopes across the globe, encompassing the Astronomical Research Institute (Westfield, IL), Institute for Astronomy (Pan-STARRS, University of Hawaii), and Mt. Operating out of a small office in the basement of the science building, Miller and the program are featured in the June 2014 Sky and Telescope magazine and the discovery comes just as the magazine hits the newsstands this month.įive students at National Dali High School in Dali City, Taiwan, Republic of China, made the discovery last week as part of the Internet-based space-watching program. Patrick Miller, co-founder and director of IASC and HSU professor of mathematics. “Some of the asteroids students have found are so close to Earth that they are considered new threats to our planet,” said Dr. This newest find is the first trans-Neptunian object (TNO) ever observed by students participating in the International Asteroid Space Collaboration (IASC), which has traditionally discovered near-Earth objects (NEO). However, this latest discovery by students in Taiwan is different from the hundreds of other discoveries. University, high school, and even junior high students from around the world have been discovering new asteroids every month since 2006, thanks to an international program run out of the Sid Richardson Science Complex at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. High school students halfway across the Earth from Hardin-Simmons University are celebrating their discovery of an object so far away it is well past Pluto.
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