Overview

• A peer-reviewed analysis led by UNESP and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics finds a likely undercounted population of asteroids sharing Venus’s orbital region that current Earth-based surveys rarely see.
• Only 20 Venus co-orbitals are cataloged and almost all are highly eccentric, a pattern the authors attribute to observational bias against low-eccentricity objects that remain near the Sun in the sky.
• Long-term simulations show these bodies can shift configurations on roughly 12,000-year cycles and some evolve onto Earth-crossing trajectories over centuries to millennia.
• Modeling indicates undiscovered objects around 300 meters across could generate hundreds of megatons of impact energy, implying city-scale devastation in a worst case.
• The team reports that even the Rubin Observatory would catch many candidates only for brief windows, and recommends space-based surveys such as NASA’s NEO Surveyor and China’s proposed CROWN mission to observe at low solar elongations.