Topic summary
Trojan Asteroid
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Trojan (celestial body).
Trojan minor planets
In 1772, the Italian–French mathematician and astronomerJoseph-Louis Lagrange obtained two constant-pattern solutions (collinear and equilateral) of the general three-body problem. In the restricted three-body problem, with one mass negligible (which Lagrange did not consider), the five possible positions of that mass are now termed Lagrange points. On February 12th, 1906, Max Wolf discovered the trojan asteroid 588 Achilles; His contemporary Carl Charlier noticed that the asteroid was caught in the L4 point of Jupiter, and thus 588 Achilles was the first discovered instance of Lagrange's theoretical calculations applying in practice.