A special camera was used to detect the asteroid trio lurking in the Sun’s glare. Find out more at 🚀
An international team of astronomers has discovered three near-Earth asteroids hiding in the inner Solar System, safely tucked in the glare of the Sun. One of them is an enormous asteroid, dubbed a "planet killer" that could someday collide with the Earth.Named 2022 AP7, the 0.9-mile-wide asteroid is the largest object that is potentially hazardous to Earth to be discovered in the last eight years.
"There are likely only a few NEAs with similar sizes left to find, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits that keep them interior to the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time," Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer at the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science and the lead author of the paper describing this work,
The finding was made possible, thanks to the U.S Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera located on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meterThe Dark Energy Camera, or the DECam, comprises high-performance, wide-field CCD imagers, that can capture details of the sky with "great sensitivity".
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