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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.
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.
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]
Astronomers estimate that the Jovian trojans are about as numerous as the asteroids of the asteroid belt. [6] Later on, objects were found orbiting near the Lagrangian points of Neptune, Mars, Earth, [7] Uranus, and Venus. Minor planets at the Lagrangian points of planets other than Jupiter may be called Lagrangian minor planets. [8]
As part of the research, the astronomers carried out numerical simulations that enabled them to model the formation and evolution of families of asteroids orbiting the sun in the main asteroid belt.
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.
The first asteroid to be photographed in close-up was 951 Gaspra in 1991, followed in 1993 by 243 Ida and its moon Dactyl, all of which were imaged by the Galileo probe en route to Jupiter. Other asteroids briefly visited by spacecraft en route to other destinations include 9969 Braille (by Deep Space 1 in 1999), 5535 Annefrank (by Stardust in ...
centaur – asteroids orbiting between the outer planets Jupiter trojan – asteroids located in Jupiter's L 4 and L 5 Lagrange points; From 50 to 99 km