Reckless orbiting in the Solar System

Planets and most asteroids revolve around the Sun in the same direction. But an asteroid that shares Jupiter's orbit has been revolving in the opposite direction for about a million years. See Letter p.687 Jupiter's co-orbital asteroid (Wiegert 22029, Phys Letter) Recent theoretical work s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 2017-03, Vol.543 (7647), p.635-636
Main Authors: Morais, Helena, Namouni, Fathi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/33/34
639/33/445/848
Asteroids
Humanities and Social Sciences
Jupiter
multidisciplinary
news-and-views
Orbits
Science
Solar system
Sun
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Summary:Planets and most asteroids revolve around the Sun in the same direction. But an asteroid that shares Jupiter's orbit has been revolving in the opposite direction for about a million years. See Letter p.687 Jupiter's co-orbital asteroid (Wiegert 22029, Phys Letter) Recent theoretical work suggests that asteroids may stably orbit the Sun in the opposite direction to the planets in our Solar System as co-orbital bodies. In 2015, astronomers detected asteroid 2015 BZ 509 , but the observations could not be used to determine its orbital motion. Here Paul Wiegert et al . present and analyse additional observations to confirm that 2015 BZ 509 is circling the Sun in a clockwise (retrograde) direction, when looking down on the Solar System, in the region of Jupiter, which is orbiting anticlockwise (prograde motion). They find that 2015 BZ 509 could remain for a million years in its current state, and speculate that it may have been a Halley-family comet, pulled into resonance through an interaction with Saturn. Retrograde co-orbital asteroids of Jupiter and other planets may be more common than previously thought.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/543635a