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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]
A hypothetical planet-sized Earth trojan the size of Mars, given the name Theia, is thought by proponents of the giant-impact hypothesis to be the origin of the Moon.The hypothesis states that the Moon formed after Earth and Theia collided, [10] showering material from the two planets into space.
Sun · 1999 UJ7 · Mars Animation of 2007 NS2 relative to Sun and Mars 1600-2500 Sun · 2007 NS2 · Mars. The Mars trojans are a group of trojan objects that share the orbit of the planet Mars around the Sun. They can be found around the two Lagrangian points 60° ahead of and behind Mars. The origin of the Mars trojans is not well understood.
Asteroids in the L 4 and L 5 Sun–Mars Lagrangian points are sometimes called Mars trojans, with a lower-case t, as "Trojan asteroid" was originally defined as a term for Lagrangian asteroids of Jupiter. They may also be called Mars Lagrangian asteroids.
A small number of asteroids have been found which are co-orbital with Earth. The first of these to be discovered, asteroid 3753 Cruithne , orbits the Sun with a period slightly less than one Earth year, resulting in an orbit that (from the point of view of Earth) appears as a bean-shaped orbit centered on a position ahead of the position of Earth.
Astronomers spotted a possible “sibling” planet that shares the orbit of another exoplanet in a system located 370 light-years away.
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.
These asteroids, while smaller than the dinosaur killer, struck our planet about 25,000 years apart. They left miles-long craters in the Mid-Atlantic Chesapeake Bay and Siberia: the fourth- and ...