3200 Phaethon

A bizarre, blue asteroid that acts like a comet and appears to be responsible for the annual Geminid meteor showermade a close flyby of Earth last year, giving astronomers an opportunity to study the object in unprecedented detail. They found that the asteroid is even weirder than they had imagined. Asteroid 3200 Phaethon is a special space rock with a rare blue color and an extremely eccentric orbit that has the object pass superclose to the sun and then out past the orbit of Mars. One orbit takes about 1.4 Earth years. This kind of orbit is more typical for … Read more