Asteroids are space rocks that are scattered throughout the Solar System. Earth scientists have tried to identify those with trajectories close to our planet to determine if there is a possibility of an impact that could threaten life on Earth.
Although it is a bit challenging to be precise, scientists around the world have identified more than a million asteroids, which have trajectories that come close to Earth’s high orbit.
The Kuiper Belt, home to the largest number of asteroids in the Solar System, is perhaps one of the greatest subjects of scientific studies.
However, a recent study by Brazilian scientists calls for us to pay attention to the asteroids of Venus. Research by this team of experts found that in our neighbor there is a huge amount of rocks that do not depend on the planet’s orbit, so they could escape and head towards our world, causing a fatal impact.
These rocks were identified as "Venus co-orbitals“. They are called that way because, even though they orbit the neighboring planet, they do not entirely depend on the gravitational attraction of Venus.
Within the group of asteroids, there are about 20 that are classified as potentially dangerous due to their size (more than 140 meters in diameter) and their distance (0.05 astronomical units or 7.5 million kilometers from Earth).
“Current ground-based observations are limited by periodic observation windows and solar elongation constraints, although the Rubin Observatory could detect some of these objects during favorable configurations. Space missions based on Venus orbits could be crucial for detecting their co-orbitals,” said Valerio Carruba, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo, as reported by Gizmodo.
Although there is much to investigate, Carruba is calling on astronomical observatories to focus instruments on the orbit of Venus to measure the trajectory of asteroids around it.