Essay on Trojan Asteroid

Trojan Asteroid

Earth is schlepping about the sun with a newly discovered space rock. This is just the second Trojan asteroid identified that belongs to our planet.

Trojan asteroids, which also orbit Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune, hang around at two places near a planet where the planet’s and the sun’s gravitational forces are balanced.

These regions in space are stable because of this balancing effort. Astronomers detected the first known Earth Trojan, 2010 TK7, orbiting within one of these two L4 areas tens of millions of kilometers from Earth and guiding our planet around the sun in 2010.

Researchers have now discovered a new one. This about 1-kilometer-wide asteroid, dubbed 2020 XL5, is likewise at L4, according to astronomer Toni Santana-Ros of the University of Barcelona and colleagues in Nature Communications on February 1, 2022.

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