English

The Second Earth Trojan 2020 XL$_{5}$

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2021-12-01 v2

Abstract

The Earth Trojans are co-orbitals librating around the Lagrange points L4L_4 or L5L_5 of the Sun-Earth system. Although many numerical studies suggest that they can maintain their dynamical status and be stable on timescales up to a few tens of thousands of years or even longer, they remain an elusive population. Thus far only one transient member (2010 TK7_7) has been discovered serendipitously. Here, we present a dynamical study of asteroid 2020 XL5_5. With our meticulous followup astrometric observations of the object, we confirmed that it is a new Earth Trojan. However, its eccentric orbit brings it close encounters with Venus on a frequent basis. Based on our N-body integration, we found that the asteroid was captured into the current Earth Trojan status in the 15th century, and then it has a likelihood of 99.5% to leave the L4L_4 region within the next \sim10 kyr. Therefore, it is most likely that 2020 XL5_5 is dynamically unstable over this timescale.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.05058,
  title  = {The Second Earth Trojan 2020 XL$_{5}$},
  author = {Man-To Hui and Paul A. Wiegert and David J. Tholen and Dora Föhring},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.05058},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to ApJL; 5 figures, 3 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:32:03.556Z