 A bird's-eye view of the outer solar system shows the orbits of Jupiter (J), Saturn (S), Uranus (U), and Neptune (N) about the Sun shown schematically. The dark tube of points lying on Neptune's orbit marks the path of the newly discovered Trojan object 2001 QR322, relative to Neptune. The Trojan shuttles back and forth along Neptune's orbit as indicated by the red and green curved arrows. Each full shuttling takes about 10,000 years to complete. Chart by Deep Ecliptic Survey Team/NOAO/AURA/NSF |
This small body, known as 2001 QR322, leads Neptune around its orbit in such a way as to maintain -- on average -- approximately equal distance from Neptune and the Sun. As such, it mimics the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter, which orbit the Sun in two clouds approximately 60 degrees ahead of and behind Jupiter. The first Jovian Trojan was discovered in 1906, and approximately 1,560 such objects are known today. However, until the discovery of 2001 QR322, Trojan-like objects associated with other giant planets had not been found.
2001 QR322 was discovered in the course of the Deep Ecliptic Survey, a NASA-funded survey of the outer solar system that uses the National Science Foundation's telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ, and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Astronomers from Lowell Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Hawaii, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory comprise the Deep Ecliptic Survey team.
The team first detected 2001 QR322 on August 21, 2001, in deep digital images taken with the 4-meter Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo by Marc Buie, Robert Millis, and Lawrence Wasserman of Lowell Observatory. However, several subsequent observations, made with a variety of telescopes over the past 16 months, coupled with numerical orbit integrations of the trajectory of the asteroid, were required to prove that 2001 QR322 is indeed a Neptune Trojan. The object is estimated to be approximately 230 kilometers (140 miles) in diameter and, like Neptune, requires about 166 years to complete each circuit of its orbit.
"Neptunian Trojans were long suspected to exist and it is gratifying to finally know that they do," says team member Eugene Chiang of the University of California at Berkeley. "The orbit of 2001 QR322 is remarkably stable; projections of its trajectory into the future reveal that it can co-orbit with Neptune for at least billions of years. "It is likely that 2001 QR322 is a dynamically pristine object whose orbital eccentricity and inclination have been largely unaltered by processes that afflicted the majority of bodies in the outer solar system," said Chiang.
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