Newly-found massive asteroid ‘2019 LF6’ spotted orbiting Sun: Details inside

A newly-found massive asteroid dubbed as ‘2019 LF6’ has been spotted orbiting the Sun, whizzing past the star every 151 days, the shortest orbit of any space rock on record, reports foxnews.com.

If you go by the size, 2019 LF6 is about 1 kilometre (0.6 miles) across and is a part of the Atira asteroid group. It is to be noted that the “Atira” asteroid consists 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.

Quanzhi Ye said, "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." "We only have about 20 to 30 minutes before sunrise or after sunset to find these asteroids," he added.

Interestingly, another Atira asteroid was discovered by the ZTF team, 2019 AQ3, which orbits the Sun approximately once every 165 days.

In a statement, NASA JPL research and Caltech professor Tom Prince said, "Both of the large Atira asteroids that were found by ZTF orbit well outside the plane of the solar system." "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," he added.

2019 LF6 was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility, "a state-of-the-art camera" at the Palomar Observatory. It looks at the sky rapidly, searching for objects such as exploding stars or moving asteroids, which made it the perfect tool to look for the Atria asteroids.

Besides the Atira asteroids, ZTF has identified about 100 near-Earth asteroids and about 2,000 orbiting in the Main Belt, between Mars and Jupiter.

RELATED