Major discoveries often begin with an accident. In 2019, a group of astronomers turned to ordinary citizens to help sort through old Hubble Space Telescope images, looking for asteroids that photobombed pictures meant for something else entirely. According to a 2024 study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics by astronomer Pablo García Martín and his team, that effort eventually found 1,701 asteroid trails, 1,031 of them objects never before recorded.
A photobombing asteroid gave the game away
