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In astronomy, a trojan is a small celestial body (mostly asteroids) that shares the orbit of a larger body, remaining in a stable orbit approximately 60° ahead of or behind the main body near one of its Lagrangian points L 4 and L 5. Trojans can share the orbits of planets or of large moons. Trojans are one type of co-orbital object.
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.
Asteroids in the leading (L 4) orbit are named after Greek heroes (the "Greek node or camp" or "Achilles group"), and those at the trailing (L 5) orbit are named after the heroes of Troy (the "Trojan node or camp"). [2] The asteroids 617 Patroclus and 624 Hektor were named before the Greece/Troy rule was devised, resulting in a "Greek spy ...
WISE, a space telescope launched into Earth orbit in December 2009, imaged 2010 TK 7 in October 2010 while carrying out a program to scan the entire sky from January 2010 to February 2011. Spotting an asteroid sharing Earth 's orbit is normally difficult from the ground, because their potential locations are generally in the daytime sky. [ 8 ]
The Trojan asteroids, which borrow their name from Greek mythology, orbit the sun in two swarms — one that’s ahead of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and a second one that ...
Lucy is a NASA space probe on a twelve-year journey to eight different asteroids. It is slated to visit two main belt asteroids as well as six Jupiter trojans – asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the planet. [4] [5] All target encounters will be flyby encounters. [6]
Hektor is the first known trojan with a satellite companion and, so far, one of only four known binary trojan asteroids in the L 4 group (the others being 16974 Iphthime, 3548 Eurybates, and 15094 Polymele). 617 Patroclus, another large trojan asteroid of the L 5 group, consists of two almost equal-sized components. [13]
Astronomers spotted a possible “sibling” planet that shares the orbit of another exoplanet in a system located 370 light-years away.