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By observing the sky at sunrise and shortly after dark, astronomers have spotted a piece of rock with the shortest "asteroid year" known to date.
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) camera quickly scans the sky every night from the Palomar Observatory, located 145 kilometers southeast of Los Angeles. ZTF looks for everything that changes over time: not only stars that flash or explode, but also asteroids that pass, like the one described in a statement Monday, July 8 California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
The recently discovered asteroid – now called 2019 LF6 – revolves around the sun every 151 days, or about between January 1 and the last day of May.
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This asteroid is one of the 20 known Atira asteroids, a class of near-Earth objects that gravitate around the Sun closer to Earth. The orbit of this piece of rock 0 km long (1 km long) passes beyond Venus and is even closer to the sun than Mercury.
"The LF6 is very unusual both in orbit and size, and its unique orbit explains why such a large asteroid has escaped decades of careful research," said Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech who discovered LF6 2019, in a statement.
The asteroid 2019 LF6 is seen here traveling across the sky in images captured by ZTF on June 10th. The movie has been accelerated: the actual elapsed time is 13 minutes.
(Image credit: ZTF / Caltech optical observatories)
According to Ye, these asteroids, huddled near the sun, are best seen 20 to 30 minutes before sunrise or after sunset. Ye has developed a dedicated observation campaign, called Twilight, to find Atira objects. With Wing-Huen Ip of Taiwan National Central University, Ye has now discovered two objects Atira. Prior to the recent discovery, the first asteroid Atira spotted by Twilight, called 2019 AQ3, had the shortest known year of all asteroids, at 165 days.
These objects are also fascinating because of their inclined orbits. "The two large Atira asteroids discovered by ZTF are turning out of the plane of the solar system," Caltech professor Tom Prince said in the same statement. "This suggests that they have already been thrown into the past by the solar system because they have moved too close to Venus or Mercury."
In addition to these two Atira objects, ZTF discovered about 100 near-Earth asteroids and 2,000 main-belt rocks in orbit around Mars and Jupiter, according to Caltech officials. Ye hopes that his sky-watching campaign will lead to more discoveries on Atira and that NASA will continue its future near-Earth objects projects, such as the mission proposed by NEOCam, which is designed to search for asteroids closer to the sun.
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