What’s That Circling Uranus?

Yep something unexpected has been found circling Uranus, and no it isn't a Klingon, and know that if my husband is reading this right now he is probably chuckling because it’s a Trojan! In this case, planetarily speaking, a Trojan is a rock or an asteroid-like object that shares a planet’s orbit, and Uranus’ Trojan was discovered by a team of Canadian and French scientists, not the Starship Enterprise. The astronomers weren't looking for a Trojan (or a Klingon either), nor were they studying Uranus. They found this almost by accident as they were surveying the outer regions of our solar system hoping to see what kinds of orbits objects out there followed in hopes of gaining insight into how our solar system formed some 4.5 billion years ago. Some Trojans around Mars, Neptune, and Jupiter are permanently bound (by gravity) to their planets and have been for billions of years. Others, like a couple of our planet’s Trojans are only temporarily trapped in a planet’s orbit. We had a couple of recent Trojans, one labeled QF99 in 2011 and another TK7 in 2010. The Trojan orbiting Uranus, which is approximately 37 miles wide, is only temporarily bound. The astronomers conducted a computer simulation that shows Uranus’ Trojan will probably drop out of orbit sometime within the next million years and become a Centaur.