Kilometer-size asteroid found:

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by paddoboy, Jul 9, 2019.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543
    https://phys.org/news/2019-07-newfound-kilometer-size-asteroid-orbits-sun.html

    Newfound kilometer-size asteroid orbits the sun every 151 days

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    Astronomers have spotted an unusual asteroid with the shortest "year" known for any asteroid. The rocky body, dubbed 2019 LF6, is about a kilometer in size and circles the sun roughly every 151 days. In its orbit, the asteroid swings out beyond Venus and, at times, comes closer in than Mercury, which circles the sun every 88 days. 2019 LF6 is one of only 20 known "Atira" asteroids, whose orbits fall entirely within Earth's.

    "You don't find kilometer-size asteroids very often these days," says Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who discovered 2019 LF6 and works with Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics at Caltech and a senior research scientist at JPL, and George Helou, the executive director of IPAC, an astronomy center at Caltech.

    "Thirty years ago, people started organizing methodical asteroid searches, finding larger objects first, but now that most of them have been found, the bigger ones are rare birds," he says. "LF6 is very unusual both in orbit and in sizeā€”its unique orbit explains why such a large asteroid eluded several decades of careful searches."


    more at link.............

    https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K19/K19M45.html
     
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  3. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    why is it not burnt off by the sun ?
     
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  5. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    rock and/or Iron asteroid, that simply isn't close enough to burn off....Far easier if it was a comet with the mushy ice and dust exterior..Basically comets will all have a solid rocky core anyway so it possibly may have been a comet, who knows?
     
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