Astronomers discover "unusual" asteroid with the shortest known orbit

Astronomers have made the rare discovery of a new asteroid circling the sun and sweeping the Earth every 151 days.

The space rock calls 2019 LF6 and it has remained hidden from cosmic experts until now, despite a width of 0.6 thousand and an orbit around the Earth.

The newly discovered asteroid has the shortest orbit of all known asteroids.

He was spotted by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology.

Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral student at Caltech, explained, "LF6 is very unusual both in orbit and size. Its unique orbit explains why such a large asteroid has escaped several decades of careful research.

The asteroid having an elliptical orbit, it moves well outside the area in which the planets of our solar system orbit and actually get closer to the sun as Mercury does.

Mercury being the closest planet to the sun, the orbit of the asteroid is very impressive.

The researchers believe that the asteroid could have been shot out of the common orbit plane with respect to the gravitational perturbations of Venus or Mercury.

Ye discovered the 2019 LF6 with the help of a camera sweeping the night sky quickly and searching for signals indicating moving asteroids, as well as exploding or blinking stars. It was only a short window to do this because this type of asteroid was most visible 20 to 30 minutes before sunrise or after sunset.

Finding an asteroid of this size is also quite rare.

Ye said, "Nowadays, we do not often find asteroids the size of a kilometer."

"Thirty years ago, people began to organize methodical research on asteroids, starting by looking for larger objects, but now that most of them have been found, the biggest ones are birds. rare. "