The Bee-Zed asteroid orbits in the opposite direction to planets http://ift.tt/2segX0E IMAGE: Co-orbital bodies that orbit the Sun in the same direction as a planet can follow trajectories (blue curves with arrows) that, from the perspective of the planet, look like tadpoles,... view more Credit: Helena Morais & Fathi Namouni In our solar system, an asteroid orbits the Sun in the opposite direction to the planets. Asteroid 2015 BZ509, also known as Bee-Zed, takes 12 years to make one complete orbit around the Sun. This is the same orbital period as that of Jupiter, which shares its orbit but moves in the opposite direction to the planet's motion. The asteroid with the retrograde co-orbit was identified by Helena Morais, a professor at São Paulo State University's Institute of Geosciences & Exact Sciences (IGCE-UNESP). Morais had predicted the discovery two years earlier, so much so that the article describing observations of the asteroid published in Nature...
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