The discovery and characterization of (594913) 'Ayló'chaxnim, a kilometre sized asteroid inside the orbit of Venus

Creators: Bolin, Bryce T.; Ahumada, Tomás; van Dokkum, P.; Fremling, C.; Granvik, M.; Hardegree-Ullman, K. K.; Harikane, Y.; Purdum, Josiah; Serabyn, E.; Southworth, J.; Zhai, C.

Abstract

Near-Earth asteroid population models predict the existence of bodies located inside the orbit of Venus. Despite searches up to the end of 2019, none had been found. We report discovery and follow-up observations of (594913) 'Ayló'chaxnim, an asteroid with an orbit entirely interior to Venus. (594913) 'Ayló'chaxnim has an aphelion distance of ∼0.65 au, is ∼2 km in diameter and is red in colour. The detection of such a large asteroid inside the orbit of Venus is surprising given their rarity according to near-Earth asteroid population models. As the first officially numbered and named asteroid located entirely within the orbit of Venus, we propose that the class of interior to Venus asteroids be referred to as 'Ayló'chaxnim asteroids.

Additional Information

After this manuscript was accepted for publication, a manuscript was published by Ip et al. (2022) that also describes the discovery of 'Ayló'chaxnim. The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author. The Twilight Survey data from 2019 September and 2020 January are available in ZTF Public Data Release 7. The authors appreciate the help of Frank Masci with ZTF asteroid identification, Alessandro Morbidelli with synthetic populations, Palomar Observatory staff for help with ZTF operations, Jacqueline Serón, Carlos Corco, and Alfredo Zenteno with SOAR observations, Peter Senchyna, Alan Dressler, Carla Fuentes, Carlos Contreras, and Andy Monson with Magellan observations, R. Quimby, M. W. Coughlin and K. B. Burdge, M. J. Graham with follow up. CF acknowledges support from the Heising-Simons Foundation (grant #2018-0907). Part of this work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA 80NM0018D0004. This research has made use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center and the Small-Body Database Lookup by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Solar System Dynamics group. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

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