In 2020, astronomers thought they’d found something incredible: the second so-called Earth Trojan asteroid ever seen. Now, a new team of researchers has confirmed that it’s real.
Trojan asteroids are small space rocks that share their orbit with a planet, circling whatever host star that planet does in a stable orbit. While we have spotted Trojan asteroids around other planets in our solar system and others, until now only one of these objects, called 2010 TK7, has been confirmed to orbit along the same path as Earth. In a new study, researchers confirmed that an asteroid spotted in 2020, called 2020 XL5, is the second object of its kind, called an Earth Trojan asteroid.
“Preliminary results showed it was in a trojan orbit around our Lagrangian point L4,” Dunn told Space.com. “Its orbit was quite uncertain at the time so I did a more careful analysis, simulating 100 clones with similar orbits. Every clone demonstrated trojan behavior as well.” “These were very challenging observations, requiring the telescope to track correctly at its lowest elevation limit, as the object was very low on the western horizon at dawn,” co-author Cesar Briceño, a researcher at the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory , said in a statement.
The team concluded that, as it was initially suspected, 2020 XL5 is an Earth Trojan asteroid. They also found that the object is also likely a C-type asteroid, the most common asteroid type in the solar system that is high in carbon and dark. “We are fully sure that 2020 XL5 will remain librating around L4 for at least 3,500 more years,” Santana-Ros told Space.com.
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