A bound pair of icy comets similar to the dirty snowballs circling outside the orbit of Neptune has been found lurking in the shadow of Jupiter.

Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, working with colleagues in France and at the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, have calculated the density of a known binary asteroid system that shares Jupiter's orbit, and concluded that Patroclus and its companion probably are composed mostly of water ice covered by a patina of dirt.

Because dirty snowballs are thought to have formed in the outer reaches of the solar system, from which they are occasionally dislodged and end up looping closer to the sun as comets, the team suggests that the asteroid probably formed far from the sun. It most likely was captured in one of Jupiter's Trojan points - two eddies where debris collects in Jupiter's orbit - during a period when the inner solar system was intensely bombarded by comets, around 650 million years after the formation of the solar system.

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"We need to discover more binary Trojans and observe them to see if low density is a characteristic of all Trojans," he said.

Trojan asteroids are those caught in the so-called Lagrange points of Jupiter's orbit, located the same distance from Jupiter as Jupiter is from the sun - 5 astronomical units, or 465 million miles. These points, one leading and the other trailing Jupiter, are places were the gravitational attraction of the sun and Jupiter are balanced, allowing debris to collect like dust bunnies in the corner of a room. Hundreds of asteroids have been discovered in the leading (L4) and trailing (L5) points, each orbiting around that point as if in an eddy.

The asteroid 617 Patroclus, originally discovered at L5 and named in 1906, was found to have a companion in 2001, and so far is the only known Trojan binary. The discoverers were not able to estimate the orbit of the components because they had too few observations.

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Because in Homer's Iliad, Patroclus was Achilles' companion and a hero of the Trojan War, Achilles would have been an appropriate name for one of the two asteroids, which are about the same size. However, another asteroid already has the name Achilles, so Marchis and his collaborators proposed naming the smallest member of the binary system Menoetius, after the father of Patroclus. The Committee on Small Body Names of the International Astronomical Union has tentatively accepted the name. The asteroid designated Menoetius is about 112 kilometers (70 miles) in diameter, while Patroclus is about 122 kilometers (76 miles) wide.