Meredith team discovers asteroid

The object, now known as K07C51J, orbits between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter

RALEIGH -- At first, the object didn't look like much to the Meredith College students peering at the heavens via their computer screens.

Was the dot a square or a roundish square? The shape of the tiny pixels on photographs of the stars is a clue as to whether the speck is an undiscovered celestial body or just a fluke of photography.

"It looked really light in the photograph," said Laurie Hunter, one of the three undergraduate students on the team. "It kind of grew on me, actually."

Last week, all the squinting and staring paid off for the researchers at Meredith, when the agency responsible for overseeing minor astronomical bodies confirmed that the team had discovered an asteroid.

The object, which according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory orbits between Mars and Jupiter, is now known as K07C51J.

There are an awful lot of objects in our solar system. Experts say thousands are found every month. The Meredith discovery was made through an international project that allows high school and college students to search for asteroids and other objects.

The discovery won't make his students famous, said Bill Schmidt, assistant professor of physics.

But that's not really the point.

"This discovery, it links the unknown and the wonder about space with something tangible," Schmidt said. "When they read figures in a book or see things in a book, those discoveries were made exactly by what they're doing now."

Through the International Asteroid Search Campaign, the students use their computers to look at photographs taken several minutes apart. Software then scans the images for differences, Schmidt said. The stars in the background are so far away that they don't seem to move at all. But other, closer objects appear to have moved in the photographs. The software highlights the differences, and that's when the students have to stare and squint and try to figure out whether they are looking at an undiscovered object or just a stray pixel or background noise.

"I go through them a lot of times. Everything looks so similar," said Hunter, 19.

Jacinta Whitehurst, 21, is also on the research team.

"It's more fun than reading things in a book," she said. "I'm pretty confident that we'll discover some more."

Schmidt said he hopes to keep the research going past the semester so other students can take a crack at finding objects.