Astronomers find Earth's first trojan asteroid

[supernova1965]

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/astronomers-find-earths-first-trojan-asteroid.ars

[renormalised]

Yep, saw this one a few days ago. Won't be the last one they find, either.

[gary]

Interesting to hear of this newly discovered Trojan, 2010 TK7, lurking in the daylight
glare.

The Trojan asteroids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(astronomy)) are of course named after characters that appear in Homer's Illiad (http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.html),
which tells the tale of the Trojan Wars.

The first asteroid that was discovered that orbited a Lagrangian point was 588
Achilles, which was discovered by Max Wolf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Wolf) in 1906. It orbits the L4 point of the
Sun-Jupiter system. Wolf's protégé, August Kopff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kopff) - a distant relative of this poster -
discovered the second, 617 Patrolclus, also in 1906 and the third, 624 Hektor, in
1907. Wolf then discovered 650 Nestor in 1908. They went on to discover more
between them and it was Wolf and Kopff who decided to stick to the convention
of naming them after Trojan figures. What's more, after a while, they came up with
the convention to name those associated with the L4 point as figures from the Greek
camp and those associated with with the L5 point as figures from the Trojan camp.

Gary Kopff
Mt Kuirng-Gai NSW

[supernova1965]

I maybe totally off base here but does this cast doubt on planets with these Trojan asteroids as the article says it is within earths orbit and even Jupiter has them? Going by the third law of what makes a planet.

[renormalised]

Those IAU resolutions were a joke. None of the planets have totally cleared their orbits of debris. So by definition, there are no planets in the Solar System.

[xelasnave]

The danger of a "committee" coming up with something to define reality Carl.

If our discoveries over the past fifty years tells us anything it is that there is more out there than our human visualizations let us entertain.

It would seem more reasonable that there is still debris out there than not... and it must follow the laws that determine orbits and placement of objects wthin a common orbit will manage that debris so we can expect what we now find.

Very interesting material.
alex