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takyon writes:

The Zwicky Transient Facility has done it again:

A massive asteroid has eluded astronomers because of its unusual orbit -- until now. Astronomers have spotted 2019 LF6, which is about a kilometer wide and boasts the shortest "year" of any known asteroid, circling the sun about every 151 days, according to the California Institute of Technology.

This rare rocky body is one of only 20 known Atira asteroids, those whose orbits fall entirely within that of the Earth. "You don't find kilometer-size asteroids very often these days," said Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who discovered 2019 LF6 via the Zwicky Transient Facility, a camera at the school's Palomar Observatory that scans the sky for objects. "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."

Venus completes one orbit around the Sun in just under 225 days. Maybe we'll find a "large" asteroid confined entirely within Mercury's ~88-day orbit some day.

2019 LF₆ (151 day orbital period, 0.3167 AU perihelion, 0.7938 AU aphelion, ~1 km diameter).
2019 AQ₃ (165 day orbital period, 0.4036 AU perihelion, 0.7737 AU aphelion, ~1.4 km diameter).

Previously: Newly Discovered Asteroid Orbits Between Mercury and Venus, With Shortest Year of Any Known Asteroid

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