Picture of Palomar observatory at night.

Inside the hunt for mysterious ‘twilight’ asteroids

A group of space rocks stays mostly inside the orbit of Earth, making them difficult to pick out in the glare of the sun—and potentially a threat to our planet.

The Zwicky Transient Facility's 605-megapixel field camera, fitted to a 48-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory, California, surveys the entire visible sky each night. Recently it discovered the first known asteroid to live entirely inside the orbit of Venus.
Photograph by Bill Ross, Getty Images
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