Astronomers have confirmed that the Earth is accompanied by a second Trojan asteroid, larger than the first one discovered in 2010. The first signs of a second companion of our planet were found in December 2020 and now there is confirmation that indeed an even larger asteroid moves along with the Earth.
Trojan asteroids move around the Sun but share the same orbit as a planet. Many such asteroids have been found around various planets in the solar system. Jupiter, for example, has more than 5.000 who will be visited by NASA's newly launched Lucy mission. It is now understood that something similar is also happening in the case of our own planet, which has been found to have two such companions, so far.
The first was the "2010 TK" with a diameter of 400 meters and the second is the "2020 XL5" with a diameter of about 1,2 kilometers, ie it is three times larger. Both have been found at the so-called Lagrange L4 point between Sun and Earth. Researchers led by Tony Santana-Ross of the Universities of Alicante and the University of Barcelona, who published their findings in the journal Nature Communications, believe that other Trojan asteroids may be found accompanying Earth in the future.
The initial discovery of the "2020 XL5", which is dark in color and rich in carbon, was made with the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii and the confirmation with the SOAR telescopes in Chile and Lowell in Arizona. Scientists estimate that the largest Trojan asteroid "2020 XL5 ″" will continue to accompany the Earth for at least another 4.000 years, but gradually its orbit will be severely disturbed and at some point will "escape" into space leaving the company of Earth.
Scientists, meanwhile, want to study the Earth's Trojan asteroids because they are made up of primitive materials dating back to the early birth of our solar system and therefore probably contain parts of the materials that formed the Earth itself. "If we can find more Trojan asteroids and some of them have more 'convenient' orbits, it will probably be cheaper to get to them than to the Moon. "So they could be ideal bases for an advanced exploration of the solar system or even a source of raw materials," said astronomer Cesar Briceno of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Source: RES-EAP