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video at link................ Scientists have discovered three elusive asteroids lurking in a region of space near the sun often cloaked by solar glare, including one they say has the capacity to deliver planetary devastation. One of the asteroids, 2022 AP7, is roughly 1 mile wide and crosses Earth's orbit trajectory around the sun, rendering it one of the most "hazardous" asteroids discovered in the past eight years, a team of researchers announced Monday. “Our twilight survey is scouring the area within the orbits of Earth and Venus for asteroids," said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Earth and Planets Laboratory...

Artist's impression of 2021 PH27. (Katherine Cain/Carnegie Institution for Science) A newly discovered asteroid has the second-shortest orbit that we know in the entire Solar System, pipped only by Mercury. It's named 2021 PH27, and it takes just 113 days to complete a circuit around the Sun, on an unstable elliptical orbit that crosses the orbital paths of both Venus and Mercury. This means that it comes extremely close to the Sun at its closest approach, or perihelion, skimming close enough to reach scorching temperatures up to 480 degrees Celsius (900 Fahrenheit). It also means that the asteroid's time is...

A newfound asteroid zips around the sun faster than any of its known kin. The space rock, known as 2021 PH27, completes one lap around our star every 113 Earth days, its discoverers determined. That's the shortest orbital period of any known solar system object except the planet Mercury, which takes just 88 days to loop around the sun. However, 2021 PH27 travels on a much more elliptical path than Mercury does and therefore gets considerably closer to the sun — about 12.4 million miles (20 million kilometers) at closest approach, compared to 29 million miles (47 million km) for...