|
|
PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL ROSS, GETTY IMAGES
|
|
They’re stealth asteroids, hanging mysteriously around the inner solar system, possibly posing a threat to Earth, but hidden by the glare of the sun. “From Earth’s perspective, they live their lives sheathed in sunbeams,” Nadia Drake writes.
They’re generally closer to the sun than Earth, so astronomers now are scanning the horizons during dusk and dawn, searching for these tiny, moving, illuminated pinpricks.
The stakes are high. These “twilight asteroids” are potentially dangerous because some might cross our orbit—without warning. “They’d be coming from the day side, so you would never see them coming,” says Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Read the full story here.
|
|
|
|
