Astronomers Discover New Record-Breaking Asteroid

Astronomers have recently discovered a record-breaking asteroid with the shortest orbital year. According to their data, the asteroid completes its cycle around the Sun every 151 days.

The astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) made the discovery through the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a powerful camera at the Palomar Observatory. The ZTF is designed to find asteroids that fall within Earth’s orbit and have short observing windows, which are also known as Atiras.

According to the astronomers, the asteroid known as 2019 LF6 is a rare one due to its size and orbit.

“You don’t find kilometer-size asteroids very often these days,” postdoctoral scholar Quanzhi Ye of Caltech said in a statement. “Thirty years ago, people started organizing methodical asteroid searchers, finding larger objects first, but now that most of them have been found, the bigger ones are rare ones.”

“LF6 is very unusual both in orbit and in size – its unique orbit explains why such a large asteroid eluded several decades of careful searches,” he added.

Prior to the discovery of 2019 LF6, the astronomers found another Atira asteroid known as 2019 AQ3. This was the previous record holder for shortest orbital year of 165 days.

According to Tom Prince, a physics professor at Caltech, these two asteroids were found orbiting near the outer planes of the Solar System. They may have ended up there because they got too close to Venus or Mercury and got affected by either of these planets’ gravitational pull.

Through their latest discovery, the astronomers are hoping that their Twilight program, an observing campaign for finding Atira asteroids, will be selected by NASA as part of its Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) mission. Since the mission is designed to use infrared to track the heat signatures of asteroids, it will be able to successfully find other Atira objects.

“Because Atira asteroids are closer to the Sun and warmer than other asteroids, they are brighter in the infrared,” George Helou, an executive at Caltech’s astronomy center said.

“NEOCam has the double advantage of its location in space and its infrared capability to find these asteroids more easily than telescopes working at visible wavelengths from the ground,” he added.