Sci/Tech Backwards asteroid shares an orbit with Jupiter without crashing

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There’s an asteroid in Jupiter’s lane that orbits the sun in the wrong direction – and it may have been doing so for more than a million years.

The asteroid 2015 BZ509 was discovered in 2015, orbiting near Jupiter but in the opposite direction. Like Jupiter and the other asteroids tied to its orbit, which are called Trojans, it takes 12 Earth years to orbit the sun.

It is the only asteroid we know of that shares a planet’s orbital space while moving in the opposite, or retrograde, direction. Paul Wiegert at the University of Western Ontario and his colleagues examined this strange orbit to figure out why BZ509 doesn’t crash head-on into Jupiter.

There are only 95 known asteroids that orbit in retrograde, most of them far from larger planets. “This makes sense: if a clown car is going to survive going the wrong way around the track, best to stay away from the big trucks,” Wiegert wrote on his website.

BZ509, on the other hand, comes within 176 million kilometers of Jupiter at its nearest, close enough for Jupiter to shift the asteroid’s orbit. Wiegert and his colleagues found that this shift actually keeps the asteroid safe.

The asteroid passes Jupiter twice per orbit: once when it slips between the planet and the sun, and once on the planet’s far side. Each pass provides a small gravitational tug, which keeps BZ509’s path just to one side of Jupiter’s so they don’t collide.



Read more here. (New Scientist)
 
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