Two students, Vaidehi Vekariya and Radhika Lakhani, from western India have just spotted an asteroid while taking part in a citizen-science project using astronomical data. The space rock is now being called 2020 OE6.
For the schoolgirls, finding the asteroid was an exciting moment: "I don't even have a TV at home, so that I can concentrate on my studies," Lakhani told Reuters.
"It was an exciting moment for the space-minded schoolgirls. "This was a dream. I want to become an astronaut," Vekariya told CNN.
The designation -- 2020 OE6 -- is a standardized nomenclature that represents the space rock's date of discovery. However, Vekariya and Lakhani will have a chance to change the name of the asteroid someday by proposing one to the International Astronomical Union.
The girls found the asteroid when the joined a citizen-science project called the International Astronomical Search Collaboration. The organization connects space enthusiasts across the world with data from two observatories that hunt asteroids: the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii. Both observatories have a chockfull of data of our skies, allowing undiscovered objects to be easily spotted.
That being said, spotting a new asteroid with just a human eye is very rare, according to Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Astronomers usually spot asteroids moving across the frame using algorithms.
This particular asteroid, however, needs no algorithm for it to be spotted. The girls were lucky to have found it in images taken by Pan-STARRS in June. the observatory has views in squares with narrow seams between them that block out certain parts of the sky in each image. Somehow, 2020 OE6 spent too much time in those seams for Pan-STARRS's algorithms to detect it in those images.
Astronomers had missed spotting the asteroid that night, but according to Rober Weryk, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, scientists would have spotted it sooner or later. And apparently, it's not the first time this asteroid has appeared in our skies.
In images taken in 2013 and 2017 from another observatory that hunts asteroids, Werky was able to identify 2020 OE6. It also showed up in a July 2020 data.
2020 OE6, according to scientists, is a Mars-Crosser, meaning it orbits at around the same distance from the sun as the Red Planet does. But in spite of the moniker, the paths of the two bodies don't actually cross.
