DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/ An asteroid estimated to be a mile/1.5km wide has found itself in the Sun’s glare – and it has an orbit that could one day put it in Earth’s path. Its size makes it large enough to be called a “killer planet”. Asteroid 2022 AP7 is the largest “potentially hazardous” object discovered in the past eight years. It was found by astronomers using a telescope in Chile to study the region near the Sun’s glow. This near-Earth asteroid is part of an elusive population hidden within the orbits of Earth and Venus, which are notoriously difficult to find. While most asteroid-hunting telescopes spend the night looking at the outer solar system, studying the inner solar system only requires observations in the 10 minutes of twilight both after sunset and before sunrise. MORE FROM FORBSMercury is no longer the closest astronomical body to the Sun: Scientists just discovered our star’s new nearest neighborJamie Carter 2022 AP7 is just one of three new near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) revealed in the inner Solar System — the region inside the orbits of Earth and Venus — in a new paper published today in The Astronomical Journal. The other two asteroids discovered, called 2021 LJ4 and 2021 PH27, have orbits inside Earth’s orbit, so they pose no threat. 2021 PH27 is the closest known asteroid to the Sun. 2022 AP7 isn’t the only “planet killer” asteroid found by the survey. “Our twilight survey scans the region within the orbits of Earth and Venus for asteroids,” said Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory and lead author. “So far we have found two large near-Earth asteroids that are about 1 kilometer in diameter, a size we call planet killers.” In addition to having only two brief 10-minute windows each night to survey the Sun’s glow region, astronomers must look very close to the horizon, which means they’re looking through the thickest part of Earth’s atmosphere. This can blur and distort their data. “Large areas of sky are required because inner asteroids are rare, and deep images are required because asteroids are faint, and you’re fighting the bright twilight sky near the Sun as well as the distorting effect of Earth’s atmosphere,” Sheppard said. Satellite dishes and telescope domes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile, South … [+] America getty Only about 25 asteroids with orbits completely within the Earth’s orbit have been discovered to date, due to the difficulty of observing near the Sun’s glow. However, the search continues because the research is tantalizingly close to completion. “There are probably only a few near-Earth asteroids of similar sizes to be found, and these large unknown asteroids probably have orbits that keep them inside the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time,” Shepard said. The observations were made using the US Department of Energy’s Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. “DCam can cover large areas of the sky at depths unattainable with smaller telescopes, allowing us to go deeper, cover more sky, and probe the inner Solar System in ways that have never been done before,” Sheppard said. . I wish you clear skies and open eyes.
