Washington, Aug 24: Researchers recently discovered the fastest orbiting asteroid, which orbits the Sun in just 113 days. This is one of the shortest known orbital periods (the time it takes a body to complete one orbit) for an asteroid and is the second shortest for any object in our solar system (second only to the planet Mercury).
The newly found asteroid has been named 2021 PH27. It is about one kilometre in length and has an unstable orbit that crosses Mercury and Venus. The image of the asteroid was taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) of a telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
The asteroid will be visible for some more days before it moves behind the Sun. Researchers are studying it to understand where asteroids originate and the forces that shape them.
By Katherine Cain & Scott Sheppard / Carnegie Institution for Science