Planet killer! Largest asteroid detected in 8 years; may crash into Earth

One of the asteroids is the largest object that is potentially hazardous to Earth to be discovered in the last eight years.

A team using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, discovered these asteroids

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This is a notoriously challenging region for observations because asteroid hunters have to contend with the glare of the Sun.

One is a 1.5-kilometer-wide asteroid called 2022 AP7, which has an orbit that may someday place it in Earth's path for a collision.

The other asteroids, called 2021 LJ4 and 2021 PH27, have orbits that safely remain completely interior to Earth's orbit.

Also of special interest to astronomers and astrophysicists, 2021 PH27 is the closest known asteroid to the Sun.

As such, it has the largest general-relativity effects of any object in our Solar System and during its orbit its surface gets hot enough to melt lead.

Finding asteroids in the inner Solar System is a daunting observational challenge.

Astronomers have only two brief 10-minute windows each night to survey this area and have to contend with a bright background sky resulting from the Sun's glare.

Discovering these three new asteroids despite these challenges was possible thanks to the unique observing capabilities of DECam.

The state-of-the-art instrument is one of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the world, giving astronomers the ability to capture large areas of sky with great sensitivity.