The appearance of a rare asteroid in orbit closer to the Sun than Venus

We have always looked at the sky and studied the solar system in it, and as science progressed we know to a large extent how things are going. But a new discovery suggests there may be more rare asteroids that we do not know about, Michel Starr points out on the Science Alert website.

The discovery was for an asteroid called the AQ3 2019, its narrow elliptic orbit nearly as close to the sun as Venus, and orbiting around the sun for only 165 days, the shortest year ever in the solar asteroid system.

"We have discovered something unusual that has almost no orbit beyond the orbit of Venus, and there may be many undiscovered asteroids," Michel said of space scientist Quanzi Ye of the California Infra-Red Therapy and Analysis Center.

Yi initially observed the asteroid on January 4, 2019 in data from the Zwicky Transit Facility (ZTF), an automatic wind survey project run by the Palomar Observatory at Caltech. It was not long before the asteroid proved to be an unusual nature, and so many telescopes were published for study on 6 and 7 January.

The archives of the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope at the Halikala Observatory in Hawaii contain unanticipated evidence of the asteroid dating back to 2015. Based on the new archival and meteorological data, researchers have been able to accurately calculate the 2019 AQ3 orbit, He walks in a strange ring that takes him above and below the orbital level of the solar system.

The proximity of this asteroid from the sun is strange. Of all the asteroids in the solar system, only 19 are asteroids (including AQ3 2019) whose orbits are fully contained within the Earth's orbit. These asteroids are known as Atira, Apohele, or Earth's Inside Objects (IEOs). Although they are not currently a threat, this may change in the future if their orbits are affected by Venus or Mercury orbits.

The asteroid's new size increases its size, so we do not know many asteroids of a size close to its size. Although it is now impossible to determine the exact dimensions of the asteroid based on limited observations so far, current estimates suggest it is up to 1.6 kilometers (1 mile). "This is one of the largest asteroids whose orbit is entirely orbiting the Earth's orbit and it is a very rare species," Michelle said of Ye.