A team of asteroid hunters that includes researchers at the University of Washington says it has identified 27,500 new, high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates — not by making fresh observations of the night sky, but by sifting through archives of astronomical data. The weeks-long database search was conducted by the Asteroid Institute, a program of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, in partnership with UW’s DiRAC Institute and Google Cloud. The two institutes developed a program called THOR,