美國密德伯里大學蒙特雷國際研究學院（Middlebury Institute of International Studies atMonterey）東亞禁核擴散計畫（East AsiaNon proliferation Program）主任路易斯（Jeffrey Lewis）認為，北韓目前的核武能力相當於美蘇1960、1970年代的水準。
Interloping asteroids snuck into a stunning Hubble Space Telescope image of a distant galaxy cluster, painting S-trails across the foreground of a truly cosmic view.
The Hubble telescope was looking at Abell 370 – a complex of several hundred galaxies linked together by gravity and located 4 billion light-years away — when seven faint asteroids (five of which had never been seen before) moved across the field of view.
Multiple Hubble exposures are typically combined into one image, so the asteroids appear in 20 separate sightings. The space rocks were, on average, about 160 million miles (260 million kilometers) from Earth — nearly five times farther away than Mars at its closest point. (The nearest distance between Earth and Mars is 33.9 million miles, or 54.6 million kilometers.) [The Most Amazing Hubble Telescope Discoveries]
“The asteroid trails look curved due to an observational effect called parallax. As Hubble orbits around Earth, an asteroid will appear to move along an arc with respect to the vastly more distant background stars and galaxies,” read a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which manages Hubble observations.
Photobombing asteroids paint S-trails across the galaxy cluster Abell 370 in this amazing composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Seven asteroids created 20 trails in this view when they crossed Hubble’s field of view during multiple exposures of the galaxy cluster.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
“This parallax effect is somewhat similar to the effect you see from a moving car, in which trees by the side of the road appear to be passing by much more rapidly than background objects at much larger distances,” STScI officials explained in the same statement. “The motion of Earth around the sun, and the motion of the asteroids along their orbits, are other contributing factors to the apparent skewing of asteroid paths.”
Each asteroid was found manually by “blinking” images (quickly moving between different images of the same field of view) to look for asteroid motion. The arcs of the asteroid motions are distinct from separate arcs of blue light, which represent distorted images of galaxies that are behind the cluster. (The light from these galaxies is bent by dark matter, scientists said.)
Asteroid trails are visible in this view from the Hubble Space Telescope taken from the Frontier Fields survey, which contains thousands of galaxies. While there are 20 asteroid trails, only seven are unique objects; the remainder are repeats caused by multiple exposures.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and B. Sunnquist and J. Mack (STScI)
“This picture was assembled from images taken in visible and infrared light,” STScI officials added in the statement. “The field’s position on the sky is near the ecliptic, the plane of our solar system. This is the zone in which most asteroids reside, which is why Hubble astronomers saw so many crossings. Hubble deep-sky observations taken along a line-of-sight near the plane of our solar system commonly record asteroid trails.”
