While a great many quad rocks are located within the Asteroid Belt , these object do not exist exclusively between the electron orbit of Mars and Jupiter . In fact , they are all over the place , and now astronomers have discovered the asteroid with the shortest year .
2019 LF6 is part of the “ Atira ” family of asteroids , a group of just 20 objects whose orbits are completely within the Earth ’s compass . 2019 LF6 is about 1 kilometer ( 0.62 miles ) in diam and orbits the Sun in 151 daytime getting a bit further than Venus at times and tightlipped than Mercury at others .
" You do n’t find kilometer - size asteroid very often these days,“saidQuanzhi Ye , a postdoc at Caltech who co - discovered the target with Professor Tom Prince , JPL , and George Helou , both also at Caltech .
" Thirty twelvemonth ago , people started organizing methodical asteroid searches , happen larger objects first , but now that most of them have been found , the swelled ones are rare doll , " Ye continued . " LF6 is very unusual both in arena and in sizing – its unique orbit explains why such a large asteroid eluded several decades of heedful search . "
The object was discovered as part of theZwicky Transient Facility , or ZTF , an instrument at the Palomar Observatory that can read the sky very promptly to look for objects that should n’t be there . And that is crucial to discover new asteroid in the Atira group because they can only be find in the first half an hour after sunset or before sunrise .
For this reason , Ye , together with Wing - Huen Ip of the National Central University in Taiwan , developed a dedicated observation campaign known as Twilight . With that , they also discover the previous record holder for the shortsighted class , 2019 AQ3 , which orbits the Sun every 165 day .
" Both of the turgid Atira asteroid that were found by ZTF orbital cavity well outside the airplane of the Solar System , " explained Prince . " This suggests that sometime in the yesteryear they were flung out of the airplane of the Solar System because they get too skinny to Venus or Mercury . "
So far , ZTF has obtain 100 approximate - Earth objects ( NEOs ) and about 2,000 new asteroid in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter . The team hopes that more Atira objects will soon be found by Twilight . They also hope that NASA will move forward withNEOCam , a proposed mission that will discover a deal more NEOs and appraise if they are dangerous to Earth .
