Asteroid 2019-LF6 is the off-angle orbit depicted in white. Earth, btw, in its orbit around the Sun,
moves at a rate of approximately 66,500 miles per hour! That's roughly 18 miles per second! -etl
Posted on 07/10/2019 7:54:57 PM PDT by ETL
A newly found asteroid has been spotted orbiting the Sun, whizzing past the star every 151 days, the shortest orbit of any space rock on record.
Known as 2019 LF6, this asteroid is quite large, at 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) across and is part of the "Atira" asteroid group, 20 space rocks whose orbits fall entirely within Earth's.
"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," says Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who discovered 2019 LF6, in a statement.
"LF6 is very unusual both in orbit and in size—its unique orbit explains why such a large asteroid eluded several decades of careful searches," Ye added. "We only have about 20 to 30 minutes before sunrise or after sunset to find these asteroids."
One other Atira asteroid has been discovered by the ZTF team, 2019 AQ3, which orbits the Sun approximately once every 165 days.
"Both of the large Atira asteroids that were found by ZTF orbit well outside the plane of the solar system," NASA JPL research and Caltech professor Tom Prince said in the statement. "This suggests that sometime in the past they were flung out of the plane of the solar system because they came too close to Venus or Mercury."
In its elliptical 151-day orbit, 2019 LF6 goes out past Venus and at certain points, comes closer to the Sun than Mercury does. By comparison, Mercury orbits the Sun every 88 days, Venus' orbit takes 225 days and Earth orbits the Sun every 365 days.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
It will be fun to watch it run into Venus.
This one, at least, will stay clear of Earth, as it’s well inside our orbit around the sun. The only concern, probably very slight is if it does get near an inner planet, it could probably get shot out into our area (but still it would be very, very, unlikely to hit us).
So Murcury & Venus are at risk of a life ending collision?
That, and 0.50cents will get you a free coffee at most anywhere in town...……., bring your own cup!
?
*ping*
Have to ask. What the heck does that mean?
Sheesh!
Regards,
Thanks. :)
I think he meant to say “That and $5.00 will buy you a Frappuccino at Starbucks.”
That’s just as dumb.
here you go..
https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/that+and+50+cents+will+buy+you+a+cup+of+coffee.html
I know what you meant, jerk. That’s why I said it was even dumber than the other stupid comment.
I posted the aerial view with 1 km indicator to show how large an asteroid that size would be in comparison to some random location on earth in the event one were actually on a course to hit earth.
Or about the same as Jerry Nadler’s rear end.
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