Planet Killer, Monster Asteroid Hiding In Sun’s Glare Found | All You Need To Know

ASTRONOMERS have spotted three new Near-Earth Asteroids, that have been hiding in the inner solar system. Among the three NEAs, one asteroid is about 1.5-kilometer-wide and is in an orbit which might collide with Earth's path someday. This new observation came just a month after NASA successfully crashed its shuttle into an asteroid to destroy to prevent a future mishap under its DART mission.

The 1.5km-wide asteroid is called 2022 AP7 which has an orbit that could place it in the Earth’s path someday, say, researchers, including those from the US National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab. According to a study in The Astronomical Journal, all three new near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) hiding in the inner Solar System in the region interior to the orbits of Earth and Venus.

These asteroids were spotted by a team of researchers who used the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

“Our twilight survey is scouring the area within the orbits of Earth and Venus for asteroids,” study lead author Scott S Sheppard, from the Earth and Planets Laboratory at Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a statement.

“So far we have found two large near-Earth asteroids that are about 1 kilometre across, a size that we call planet killers,” he said.

According to the report, the 2021 PH27 is the closest known asteroid to the Sun and, as such, it has the largest general-relativity effects of any object in our Solar System and during its orbit, its surface gets hot enough to melt lead.

“There are likely only a few NEAs with similar sizes left to find, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits that keep them interior to the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time. Only about 25 asteroids with orbits completely within Earth’s orbit have been discovered to date because of the difficulty of observing near the glare of the Sun,” Sheppard added.

Meanwhile, this research is an important step toward understanding the distribution of small bodies in our Solar System. According to scientists the research also provides more insights into how gravitational interactions and the Sun’s heat contribute to the fragmentation of such space rocks.