Main Belt's smallest ever asteroids have been detected

The Main Asteroid Belt's smallest ever asteroids have been detected, as discovered in a new study.

The belt is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and smaller rocks orbiting among the larger ones are being discovered all the time, reports IFL Science.

While asteroids in the decametre class, which are tens of metres wide and some as big of football stadiums, are commonly seen, these scientists found ones as small as 10 metres.

Before now, the smallest asteroids scientists were able to see there were about a kilometre in diameter.

In a statement, Artem Burdanov, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science and the lead author of the study, said: "We have been able to detect near-Earth objects down to 10 meters in size when they are really close to Earth.

"We now have a way of spotting these small asteroids when they are much farther away, so we can do more precise orbital tracking, which is key for planetary defence."

The Main Asteroid Belt's smallest ever detected asteroids are just 10 metres in size / PaulFleet, iStock

In a new paper published in the Nature journal, the scientists said they reused images from previous searches for exoplanets from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

Stacks of images looking at the same distant star field were used in a technique called 'shift and stack' which looks to highlight possible movement in the foreground.

138 asteroids were spotted in the decametre size but the smallest ones were around 10 metres.

Julien de Wit, a MIT professors of planetary science who also worked on the study, said: "For most astronomers, asteroids are sort of seen as the vermin of the sky, in the sense that they just cross your field of view and affect your data.

"We thought we would just detect a few new objects but we detected so many more than expected, especially small ones."

The researchers hope this approach can be used to track asteroids that are likely to approach Earth.

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