Solar System's fastest-orbiting asteroid spotted, flies closer to the Sun than Mercury Astronomers have discovered the Sun's fastest-orbiting asteroid yet, a one-kilometre-wide rock that completes a lap of our star every 113 Earth days. That's "the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System," according to the US National Science Foundation's NOIRLab. The space boulder, known as 2021 PH27 …
As an aside, if you want to avoid haemorrhoids / piles you can try defecating with your knees raised above the level of your hips. The western toilet that has people sitting rather than squatting means that the anatomy of the rectum has muscles that impede the faces leaving the body causing pressure on the sphincter.
You can just get a footstool to rest your feet on when you defecate. It seems that people who squat to defecate have much lower incidence of piles than those who sit.
https://journals.lww.com/ajg/fulltext/2010/10001/squatting__a_forgotten_natural_instinct_to_prevent.387.aspx
Here endeth the lesson.
No, Russell's Teapot orbits between Earth and Mars. This is Vulcan. which is actually more important in the history of science.
Are you sure it is not Icarus?
Oh, hang on, that name is already taken:
"1566 Icarus, provisional designation 1949 MA, is an extremely eccentric asteroid, approximately 1.4 km (0.87 mi) in diameter. It is a near-Earth object of the Apollo group and the lowest numbered potentially hazardous asteroid. In 1968, it became the first asteroid ever observed by radar. Its orbit brings it closer to the Sun than Mercury and further out than the orbit of Mars, which also makes it a Mercury-, Venus-, and Mars-crosser. This stony asteroid and relatively fast rotator was discovered by German astronomer Walter Baade at the Palomar Observatory, California, on 27 June 1949. It was named after the mythological Icarus."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1566_Icarus
Dear Mr Brown,
I no longer commute. I am a 'gentleman of leisure'*.
Now that you mention it, I do remember reading "Summertime on Icarus" many years ago. Thanks for the reminder.
*Also known as 'unemployed', 'unemployable' or, in my case, 'retired' (but not yet 'sponging off the state').
The claim that this is one of the fastest asteroids yet discovered seems unsubstantiated, although the period of its orbit around the sun is indeed short.
By my calculations its average speed around the path of its orbit is in the region of 31km/s - about the same as that of the earth - and well short of that of many bodies in the solar system. Mercury for example clocks in at 48km/s, and sun-grazing comets can reach over 500km/s at perihelion.
Relative to the cosmic microwave background, the solar system toddles along at a sedate 600km/s.
We're talking about orbital period. It's said to be the fastest-orbiting asteroid. It gets around the Sun in 113 days, fewer than any other asteroid in our neck of the woods, apparently.
PH27 is described as "an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System."
C.
This I find puzzling:
Article: "Since PH27 lives so close to the Sun, and has a relatively low mass, it experiences general relativistic effects more so than any other known Solar System object,"
Why should the mass matter for relativistic effects? As we all know, gravity affects a feather and a hammer the same way (in the absence of air friction).
As other commenter said it is mass relative to mass of Sun which is interesting. if object is very light compared to Sun then is better treatable as 'test particle' orbiting in unperturbed Schwarzschild solution which it is too light to perturb. In fact in case of something where there are other massive objects (mostly Jupiter, although there are some other planets they say) probably you might need to treat perturbation of Schwarzschild by those massive objects, but still the test particle itself can be treated as not perturbing solution: it is just travelling on geodesic in existing field.
Remember that GR corrections to Newtonian gravity are very small: historically not detectable apart from Mercury although I believe now can be measured for even Earth. So very small perturbations in Sun's field can't be thrown out or you would throw out baby with bathwater.
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