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The Jupiter trojans, commonly called trojan asteroids or simply trojans, are a large group of asteroids that share the planet Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. Relative to Jupiter, each trojan librates around one of Jupiter's stable Lagrange points: either L 4, existing 60° ahead of the planet in its orbit, or L 5, 60° behind. Jupiter trojans ...
Over 200 asteroids are known to be larger than 100 km, [63] and a survey in the infrared wavelengths has shown that the asteroid belt has between 700,000 and 1.7 million asteroids with a diameter of 1 km or more. [64] The number of asteroids in the main belt steadily increases with decreasing size.
This is a list of Jupiter trojans that lie in the Trojan camp, an elongated curved region around the trailing L 5 Lagrangian point, 60° behind Jupiter in its orbit.. All the asteroids at the trailing L 5 point have names corresponding to participants on the Trojan side of the Trojan War, except for 617 Patroclus, which was named before this naming convention was instituted.
The asteroids are like fossils themselves, representing the leftover material hanging around after the formation of giant planets in our solar system, including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Hence the smallest object orbits around the barycenter with the same orbital period as the planet, and the arrangement can remain stable over time. [1] In the Solar System, most known trojans share the orbit of Jupiter. They are divided into the Greek camp at L 4 (ahead of Jupiter) and the Trojan camp at L 5 (trailing Jupiter).
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19]
It lies in Jupiter's leading Lagrangian point, L 4, called the Greek camp after one of the two sides in the legendary Trojan War. Hektor is named after the Trojan hero Hektor and is thus one of two trojan asteroids that is "misplaced" in the wrong camp (the other one being 617 Patroclus in the Trojan camp ).
In the moments before NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in a landmark planetary defense test in 2022, it took high-resolution images of this small celestial object and its ...