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Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered an extremely rare type of asteroid – the 2019 AQ3, which tilts very tightly around the Sun – its orbit is located in the orbit of Venus.
ScienceAlert writes about it
belongs to a very rare type of asteroids that revolve around the Sun even closer than the Earth. Of the 800,000 open asteroids of the Atiri family, only 19 are known.
The 2019 AQ3 asteroid has the shortest distance of Ophelia (the farthest from the star of the orbital point) of the Sun – about 0.77737 a. e and in perihelion (the shortest distance in sun orbit) – only 0.4036 ae We turn around the star 2019 AQ3 takes 164 days. At the same time, its diameter is close to 1.6 km
The asteroid was detected on January 4 with the help of a ZTF telescope. After identifying the asteroid, it turned out that astronomers had observed it in Pan-STARRS 1 in Hawaii in 2015, but they were unable to define its orbit.
It is possible that an asteroid runs closer to the sun – 2016 XK24, with a period of 161 days. However, scientists have observed it for a very short time in 2016, so its orbit is still not defined.
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