Found! Fastest-Orbiting Asteroid Zips Around Sun in Just 165 Days
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | February 8, 2019 07:21am ET
Astronomers have just found an asteroid that zips around the sun every 165 Earth days.
That's the shortest year for any asteroid known to humankind, discovery team members said. And the space rock, called 2019 AQ3, could be part of a vast and virtually unknown population zooming through the inner solar system, quite close to the sun.
"We have found an extraordinary object whose orbit barely strays beyond Venus' orbit — that's a big deal," Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral researcher at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), an astronomy data and science facility at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in a statement. [Watch: Asteroid 2019 AQ3's Superfast Orbit Around the Sun]
2019 AQ3 is a "very rare species," Ye said, adding that "there might be many more undiscovered asteroids out there like it." To be clear, asteroid 2019 AQ3's orbit isn't the fastest of any object. The planet Mercury makes one trip around the sun every 88 days. But the space rock is unique, researchers said.
Ye spotted 2019 AQ3 on Jan. 4, in images captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a sky-surveying camera installed on the 48-inch (122 centimeters) Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
More:
https://www.space.com/43263-fastest-orbiting-asteroid-found-2019-aq3.html?utm_source=notification
Palomar, an oldie but goodie.
