Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered a rare asteroid orbiting snugly within the inner confines of the solar system. The body, called 2020 AV2, was discovered by the California Institute of Technology’s Zwicky Transient Facility and approved by other observatories around the world. The asteroid crosses about 1-3 km and has an elongated orbit tilted about 15 degrees relative to the plane of the solar system. 2020 AV2 thus becomes the first-known asteroid that orbits the sun entirely within the orbit of Venus. The Zwicky camera, connected to a telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California, is well adapted to finding asteroids because it scans the entire sky rapidly and can recognize asteroids during their short-lived occurrences in the night sky.
