{"id":125767,"date":"2022-02-06T16:19:20","date_gmt":"2022-02-06T21:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=125767"},"modified":"2025-06-20T09:50:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T13:50:00","slug":"earths-2022-valentine-an-asteroid-sharing-our-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/earths-2022-valentine-an-asteroid-sharing-our-orbit\/","title":{"rendered":"Earth\u2019s 2022 Valentine \u2013 An Asteroid Sharing Our Orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earth has discovered it has a secret valentine \u2014 an asteroid called 2020 XL5<\/sub>.<\/p>\n

An international team of astronomers confirmed this week that the asteroid shares our planet\u2019s orbit, only the second asteroid ever discovered to do that. The revelation is important because these Earth Trojans may help explain how planets formed in the solar system.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s work is published in this week\u2019s Nature Communications<\/em> journal.<\/p>\n

Toni Santana-Ros, from the University of Alicante and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona led the study. Maxime Devog\u00e8le, a UCF research scientist, and part of the planetary radar group at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, was part of the team. UCF manages the observatory for the U.S. National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement.<\/p>\n

Three ground-based telescopes were used to confirm the asteroid. The data also indicates the asteroid is about .62 miles-wide and is made up of rock and carbon-containing materials.<\/p>\n

Devog\u00e8le used the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona to obtain the images of 2020 XL5<\/sub>. The Optical Ground Station in Tenerife of Spain\u2019s Canary Islands, and the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile were also used. These telescopes were ideal because asteroids that share orbits of their host planets tend to ride near the sun. So, it gets tricky aligning telescopes at just the right time to find the asteroids. The scientists found additional confirmation by looking at data sets collected by other telescopes from 2012-2015.<\/p>\n

These observations were conducted as part of a NASA program to observe recently discovered asteroids that could potentially pose a hazard to the Earth, Devog\u00e8le says. This asteroid doesn\u2019t pose any danger and is expected to tag along Earth for about 4,000 years.<\/p>\n

Trojan Asteroids<\/strong><\/p>\n

Asteroids that share an orbit with a planet are called Trojan asteroids. Trojan asteroids get \u201ctrapped\u201d in locations in space known as Lagrange points where the gravitational tug between a planet and the sun balance one another. Thousands of Trojan asteroids are located at the Lagrange points near Jupiter. NASA\u2019s Lucy mission, launched late 2021, will explore six of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s massive James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, has just arrived at another Lagrange point near Earth and will begin a new era of astronomical observations starting this summer.<\/p>\n