Research has shown that the Earth trails an asteroid barely a kilometer across in its orbit about the Sun – only the second such body to have ever been spotted. It goes around the Sun on average two months ahead of the Earth, dancing around in front like an excited herald of our coming.
This object, known as 2020 XL₅, was first spotted in December 2020 using Pan-STARRS telescopes on the summit of Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui. But the determination of its orbit required follow-up observations using the 4.1-meter SOAR (Southern Astrophysical Research) telescope in Chile.
500 years of 2020 XL5 orbits plotted, relative to Earth. By Phoenix7777 – Own work data source: HORIZONS System, JPL, NASA CC BY-SA 4.0
Based on this data, a team led by planetary scientist Toni Santana-Ros of the University of Alicante in Spain has now announced that 2020 XL₅ is trapped for at least the next several thousand years in an orbit about one of the Sun-Earth “Lagrange points”. These are where the gravitational forces of the Earth and the Sun balance to create stable locations. It means the objec ..
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