![]() The asteroid should jitter around the L4 region for about 70,000 years before becoming unstable enough to be ejected. Uranus’s Trojan is probably a temporary companion captured later in the planet’s history. But they were thought to be extremely unlikely for Saturn and Uranus, because massive Jupiter would have sucked in any space rocks leftover as the solar system formed. Since the Jovian discoveries, Trojan asteroids have also been spotted near Neptune, Mars and even Earth. They are the original cosmic Trojans, named after the legendary fighters of ancient Troy. Jupiter’s L4 and L5 points host more than 3000 asteroids of various sizes. ![]() These points have long been known to act as dust-gathering niches. The ones called L4 and L5 sit ahead of and behind the planet, respectively, in its orbital path. There are five possible Lagrange points around two massive bodies, such as the sun and a planet. It lives in a Lagrange point, where the gravitational tugs from the sun and Uranus balance out. Mike Alexandersen of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and colleagues discovered the 60-kilometre-wide Trojan, named 2011 QF99, from an observatory in Hawaii.
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