We’re launching a brand new feature on Liminal Fiction – “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Today:
A newfound asteroid zips around the sun faster than any of its known kin.
The space rock, known as 2021 PH27, completes one lap around our star every 113 Earth days, its discoverers determined. That’s the shortest orbital period of any known solar system object except the planet Mercury, which takes just 88 days to loop around the sun.
However, 2021 PH27 travels on a much more elliptical path than Mercury does and therefore gets considerably closer to the sun — about 12.4 million miles (20 million kilometers) at closest approach, compared to 29 million miles (47 million km) for the solar system’s innermost planet.
