Asteroid Bonanza

Sometimes you look for one thing, but find something else entirely. That's what happened to a team of five astronomy students from the University of Washington.

The team, working under the direction of assistant professor Andrew Becker, was looking for supernovae, but asteroids kept getting in the way Eventually, the team catalogued about 1,300 previously undiscovered asteroids. That's about 1 out of every 260 known objects in the Solar System.

Happily, none of the asteroids discovered pose an immediate danger to Earth, though some of them do cross Earth's orbit in their own orbits, and may, therefore, threaten Earth at some point.