Two asteroids hid in plain sight for 12 years. I found them.
2026-10-08 · Space · Submitted, awaiting the Minor Planet Center
In March 2014 a supernova survey pointed the Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile at one patch of sky 20 times over five nights. The images went into a public archive. Asteroids drifted through them, and most were reported. Two weren’t.
What I did
The survey was the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS). It wanted exploding stars, not asteroids, so moving dots were background to it. Its images sit in NOIRLab’s archive, and a catalog built from them lists every dot in every frame.
I pulled every dot that appears once and never again, and linked the ones that move in a straight line through a single night: 1,754 moving objects.
I checked each against every known asteroid’s predicted position at that moment, and against the Minor Planet Center’s own files of reports from this telescope. 1,503 were already known.
Of the rest, 17 showed up on two nights and fit one orbit around the Sun.
I used each orbit to predict where the object should be on the other nights, and went looking. Two were there, again and again.
For those two I went back to the original pixels: tied every frame to the Gaia star catalog, measured the positions and brightness myself, and checked each detection by eye.
The two
1F916A: a small main-belt asteroid
The same patch of sky, three exposures on 2 March 2014. Stars stay put. The circled dot moves.
Detections
13, on all five nights (1–5 March 2014)
Orbit fit
0.11 arcseconds average miss across all 13
Orbit
2.28 AU from the Sun, nearly circular, one lap every 3.4 years
Size
Roughly 300–650 m, from its brightness and a range of likely surface darkness
1F916B: a slow one, far out
Four exposures on 3 March 2014. This one is fainter and slower.
Detections
10, on four nights (2–5 March 2014)
Orbit fit
0.35 arcseconds average miss
Distance
Its slow drift puts it near Jupiter’s distance from the Sun, roughly 5 AU, in the stretch of sky where Jupiter’s leading Trojan asteroids gather
Size
A few kilometers across, if it’s as dark as objects out there usually are
What I don’t know
Whether 1F916B is a Jupiter Trojan. Its distance fits, but four nights can’t pin down an orbit. One fit looks like a Trojan’s; another doesn’t. I won’t call it one until a longer arc does.
Whether either is truly new. Neither matches anything I can check. But an object found recently, with an orbit too rough to trace back to 2014, could be the same rock. The Minor Planet Center checks that, and its answer is the one that counts.
Who gets discovery credit. The Center decides, and the people who took the images may get it. That would be fair.
I also dropped one detection of 1F916B that sat beside a bad column at the edge of the camera chip. It probably shows the object, but “probably” isn’t good enough for the record.
Status
Submitted to the Minor Planet Center on 2026-10-08. Submission ID 2026-10-08T16:46:09.769_0000CFay. All 23 observations were accepted for processing and given observation IDs, which the Center only assigns to observations it doesn’t already have.
Next: the Center either gives each object a provisional designation or matches it to something already known. Either way, this page will say so.
Credits and receipts
Images: Blanco 4-m telescope and Dark Energy Camera, Cerro Tololo, Chile. HiTS survey (program 2014A-0608, PI F. Förster), observed by L. Galbany and S. González-Gaitán. Served by NOIRLab’s Astro Data Archive and Astro Data Lab.
Catalog: NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2.
Known-object checks: IMCCE’s SkyBoT, and the Minor Planet Center’s observation files.
