Trojan: in the secret place

The Earth was discovered long ago predicted by satellite - the Trojan asteroids.
In any system of two gravitationally bound bodies there are points in which they are relatively attractive balance each other. So be here the third body ( if its mass in comparison with the two main bodies is negligible ) will be equal attracted to both, will remain at this point still. These regions - the point of Lagrange ( libration points ) - there are in the Sun - Earth. In one of them (L1), at 1.5 million miles ahead of the Earth, working space observatory SOHO. And it doubles point L2, at 1.5 million miles behind Earth, scientists have put a huge dream of a space telescope that could maintain surveillance, keeping the same location (read: ...

Another pair of Lagrange points, L4 and L5, can easily appear as vertices of equilateral triangles, one side of which connects the Sun and Earth, and lying in the plane of Earth's orbit. These points are traditionally referred to as Trojan - in honor of the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter, the most striking example of the bodies, ... And the inhabitants of L4 are the names of the Greek warrior ( Achilles and his team ), and L5 - Trojans ( Patroclus, Aeneas and the company ). Trojan asteroids are known as Mars and Neptune.

The presence of Trojan asteroids near the Earth was assumed for a long time, but due to the complexity of the observations so far, none of these bodies were found: they can not be large, and visually arranged for us at 60 ° from the Sun, visible only during the day, which greatly . Only the other day, made ​​by analyzing the orbital infrared telescope WISE images found our first ...

Using the WISE researchers implement an ambitious program of NEOWISE, in which the search and identification of near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets, which in its movement closer to the Earth's orbit less than 45 million kilometers (0.3 and. e. ). To date, NEOWISE covered more than 155 thousand. Great bodies of the asteroid belt and more than 500 near-Earth objects, including 132 previously unknown.

One of them - called the 2010 TK7 - and was thus ... The asteroid that is about 300 m in diameter and a very unusual orbit, describing the move a long and dense spiral, being now on the Earth at a distance of about 80 million km. Calculations show that it will remain on this trajectory, at least another hundred years, not coming close to Earth at a distance of less than 24 million km. Our mutual motion of the asteroid like shooting a big planet for a little ahead of his body, which is well ahead of flickers.