AstroUnit

A large team of astronomers discovered the first asteroid inside the orbit of Venus using the Zwicky Transient Facility  located at the Palomar Observatory in California, United States. The asteroid has been named 2020 AV2 and is roughly 2 km in size with an aphelion distance (i.e., the point in the orbit of an object where it is farthest from the Sun ) of 0.65 astronomical units. The discovery could very well indicate that there may be a yet undiscovered population of asteroid lying outside of the asteroid belt and if more such asteroids are discovered,  currently favored asteroid population models may need to be adjusted. Image of the largest asteroid Ceres. Source  Wikipedia As of this writing, almost all of  1 million known asteroids  lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter with only a handful lying near the orbit of Earth.  Many scientists argue that there must be another population of asteroids present near the orbit of Venus. However, no such ast...