A newly discovered asteroid stands out as one of the fastest objects in the solar system, orbiting around the sun far faster than any other known asteroid.
Dubbed 2021 PH27, the asteroid in question is around 1 kilometer in size and circles around the Sun, doing a full lap every 113 days. This is far faster than any other object in the solar system, save for Mercury, the first planet from the Sun, which completes a lap in just 88 days.
But while Mercury may be faster, this asteroid can get closer.
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2021 PH27 has an unstable orbit crossing Mercury and Venus in its orbit around the Sun. Most likely, it originated from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, getting dislodged and eventually getting caught in the Sun’s orbit. But on occasion, this unstable orbit brings it even closer to the Sun than Mercury, and gets as close as 12.4 million miles (20 million km.) away from the Sun. For context, Mercury, at its closest, only gets to 29 million miles (47 million km.) away from the Sun.
And getting this close means the Sun’s heat will hit the asteroid hard.
Because of the asteroid’s unstable orbit, it won’t stay that way forever. It is estimated that in a few million years or so, 2021 PH27 will eventually impact Mercury or Venus, or end up flying into the Sun.
But one question remains regarding this asteroid: Why have we only just discovered it now, if it’s so close to the Sun?
The asteroid was discovered by Sheppard and an international team of astronomers on August 13. To do this, they had to utilize the Dark Energy Camera on the Victor M. Blanco 4 m. Telescope at Chile’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and had to be properly examined at twilight. This is because of how hard it is to find asteroids closer to the Sun than the Earth is, and how twilight is the ideal time to look for them.
This is true for all objects closer to the Sun than the Earth is, with Mercury and Venus always being most visible in the sky at twilight.
These objects tend to approach the Earth during the daytime, which means they can often be obscured by the Sun’s glare.
Asteroids closer to the Sun than the Earth is present a notable hole in most surveys of asteroids near the Earth due to being so difficult to detect, and as a result, understanding them is of vital importance.
This is because these asteroids still can come into close proximity of the planet, and thus could possibly pose a potential impact risk in the future.
As of now, scientists don’t think 2021 PH27 could ever pose a threat to the planet, but the same cannot be said with certainty for all asteroids.
An asteroid impact remains one of the most dangerous possible natural disasters that could occur, however unlikely. It is for this reason that astronomers around the world, including NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), work to monitor all nearby asteroids and calculate their trajectory to see if any of them pose a threat to the planet.