I don’t normally post about things other than technology, but this piece of info caught me completely by surprise and I felt I had to post it to share it with you, my few readers.

Tom’s Astronomy Blog has a very interesting post about an astroid with a very unusual orbit. The asteroid, named 2010 SO16 was found by the WISE spacecraft and would probably have simply been recorded as yet another among the hundreds of thousands if not millions that are in the solar system. Except, this particular asteroid has a very rare orbit. It’s orbit is called a Horseshoe orbit and all you have to do is look at the image below to see just how strange it is.

If you follow the link above to Wikipedia, they do a great job describing how the orbit works, but the cyan line in the above image is the path the asteroid takes as it orbits the Sun. It shares the Earth’s orbit, but will probably never hit the Earth do to the way its orbit changes as it gets close to the Earth.

I’ve never heard of such an orbit until now and probably would never have heard of it if not for Tom’s Astronomy Blog. The blogs articles are usually not very interesting, but I check it for images from Hubble, so it is in my RSS feeds.

Still, it’s cool to know that we can find such odd happenings in our wonderful universe.