Trojan asteroid circling the sun in the Earth’s orbit

NASA’s Wide—field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has discovered a long—hidden companion of the Earth — the first Trojan asteroid circling the sun in the Earth’s orbit.

In 1772 the French mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange predicted the existence and location of two groups of small bodies located near a pair of gravitationally stable points along Jupiter’s orbit. The term originally referred to the Trojan asteroids orbiting around Jupiter’s Lagrangian points and asteroids at the Lagrangian points of other planets may be called Lagrangian asteroids. Subsequently objects have been found orbiting the Lagrangian points of Neptune, Mars, and Earth.

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