Venus Harbors Secret Asteroids That Could Threaten Earth, Study Warns

Twenty years ago, Congress gave NASA a directive: find 90% of the near-Earth asteroids that could potentially harm our little world. Since then, astronomers have made major progress tracking down the rocky space debris, but a new study suggests there’s a population of asteroids lurking around Venus that could pose a problem. These so-called “Venus co-orbitals” share a similar path around the Sun with our neighbor planet but aren’t harmless tagalongs. According to a paper under review for the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and currently hosted on arXiv, a yet-undetected group of the asteroids could pose a threat to Earth. Potentially hazardous asteroids (or PHAs) are those larger than 460 feet (140 meters) across that come within 0.05 astronomical units (4.6 million miles, 7.5 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit. Valerio Carruba, a researcher at the University of São Paulo, led the research. Carruba’s team suspects there are more than the 20 known co-orbital asteroids of Venus, t ... Read full article.