Students find Neptune's hidden companions — and double their number

Neptune keeps a quiet entourage: asteroids that share its orbit, trailing the planet around the Sun. They are so faint and so far away that only a handful were known — until a team led by Queen's University Belfast astronomers, including students, went looking with data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, home to the largest digital camera ever built. Led by Dr Meg Schwamb and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team identified two asteroids and a candidate as permanent members of Neptune's trailing Trojans — doubling, in one study, the number of known objects settled on these long-lived orbits. Over the next nine years, Rubin is expected to find tens to hundreds more.