Meet 2020 AV2, the 1st asteroid entirely within the orbit of Venus (earthsky.org)
Posted by Gianluca Masi in Space | January 15, 2020
Originally published at VirtualTelescope.eu. Reprinted here with permission.
Among hundreds of thousands of known asteroids, only 21 ones are known/suspected to have an orbit entirely inside that of the Earth. The just discovered 2020 AV2 is the first one to move entirely inside the orbit of Venus. That fact makes it a very special object. The Virtual Telescope Project contributed to confirm its discovery, and we are proud to present our image (above).
This object is certainly special: it is the first one ever found on an orbit entirely inside that of Venus.
We know quite a number of asteroids. The Minor Planet Center said on May 18, 2019, that it has about 792,000 orbits in its archives. These asteroids are orbiting around the sun at distances spanning a very large range. If we query that database, asking how many of those objects have an orbit entirely inside of the Earth, we get back only 21 asteroids. Clearly, these Inner-Earth Objects, or IEOs – defined by their aphelia Q < 0.983 AU - are difficult to find.
You can easily understand why finding an IEO is hard. Ask yourself: how many times have I seen Jupiter? How many times have I seen Mercury? Very likely, you saw the former much more often than the latter. Why? Because Mercury’s orbit is well inside that of the Earth, so you can see the innermost planet only at dusk, low on the horizon and for a short time.
In other words, from the Earth, you can never see Mercury (and Venus, for the same reason) in complete darkness and high in the sky, when observing conditions would be much better and much more technically feasible for the telescopes involved in most survey projects. This difficulty adds to the expected small number of IEOs out there, estimated to be just 2% of the more common near-Earth objects (NEOs).
The intervenusian objects – with orbits entirely within the orbit of Venus – are even harder to find.
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more: https://earthsky.org/space/2020-av2-1st-intervenusian-asteroid?
Somewhat dated news, but I hadn't seen this when it first came out.
= new reply since forum marked as read
