Asteroids hidden by the intense glare of the Sun

As a general rule, astronomical observations aimed at discovering new asteroids or deepening the study of known ones take place at night and tend to focus on objects that are further from the Sun than the Earth is.

Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington DC, United States, has recently given an overview of the state of a rather unusual field of study: that of asteroids whose peculiar orbits cause them to be hidden by the intense glare of the sun. Sun.

Observing initiatives are underway that scan orbits closer to the Sun than Earth’s. The goal of these programs is to search for near-Earth objects in orbits closer to the Sun than Earth’s.

These studies have recently identified numerous asteroids with orbits closer to the Sun than Earth’s. Until now, all these asteroids had gone completely unnoticed.

One of them is the first known asteroid with an orbit closer to the Sun than that of Venus (Aylochaxnim, 2020 AV2).

Another of these unusual asteroids is the one with the shortest known orbital period around the Sun: 2021 PH27.

Orbits of some asteroids that come closer to the Sun than the Earth does. (Image: NASA JPL/Caltech)

In general, objects orbiting between our planet and the Sun are difficult to detect, since they are often obscured by the Sun’s powerful glare.

But little by little, celestial bodies of that class are being discovered, and they are cataloged in one of the incipient categories, which are that of the bodies with orbits closer to the Sun than that of the Earth but less than that of Venus, the of those that have orbits closer to the Sun than that of Venus but less than that of Mercury), and even that of those that have orbits closer to the Sun than that of Mercury. The latter are called vulcanoids, but none have yet been observed.

In her paper, Sheppard discusses what these recent discoveries and ongoing telescopic studies toward the Sun could tell us about these unique classes of asteroids, including their formation, and also highlights their potential to provide crucial tracking data for asteroids whose orbits could lead them to impact. against Earth.

The study is titled “In the glare of the Sun”. And it has been published in the academic journal Science. (Source: AAAS)