Jupiter trojan

The Jupiter trojans, commonly called Trojan asteroids or just Trojans, are a large group of asteroids that share the orbit of the planet Jupiter around the Sun. Relative to Jupiter, each Trojan librates around one of Jupiter's two stable Lagrangian points, L₄, lying 60° ahead of the planet in its orbit, and L₅, 60° behind. Jupiter trojans are distributed in two elongated, curved regions around these Lagrangian points with an average semi-major axis of about 5.2 AU.

The first Jupiter trojan discovered, 588 Achilles, was spotted in 1906 by German astronomer Max Wolf. A total of 6,178 Jupiter trojans have been found as of January 2015^[update]. By convention they are each named after a mythological figure from the Trojan War, hence the name "Trojan". The total number of Jupiter trojans larger than 1 km in diameter is believed to be about 1 million, approximately equal to the number of asteroids larger than 1 km in the asteroid belt. Like main-belt asteroids, Jupiter trojans form families.

Jupiter trojans are dark bodies with reddish, featureless spectra. No firm evidence of the presence of water, or any other specific compound on their surface has been obtained, but it is thought that they are coated in tholins, organic polymers formed by the Sun's radiation. The Jupiter trojans' densities (as measured by studying binaries or rotational lightcurves) vary from 0.8 to 2.5 g·cm⁻³. Jupiter trojans are thought to have been captured into their orbits during the early stages of the Solar System's formation or slightly later, during the migration of giant planets.

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