For more than fifteen years, Neptune's trailing Trojan cloud sat in near-perfect alignment with the galactic center, hidden behind the densest stellar curtain in the night sky. Only two objects had ever been confirmed in that gravitational pocket. At the 58th Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS 58) meeting in Spokane, Washington — which wrapped up Friday — Megan Schwamb of Queen's University Belfast announced that the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has already found three new trailing swarm members of Neptune's L5 cloud using data collected before its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) had even formally begun. The two confirmed objects, 2025 MH348 and 2025 NN80, are long-term stable Trojans that have occupied their orbits for billions of years, and they more than double the known confirmed population of Neptune's trailing cloud. For solar system scientists building a census of the outer solar system, the wait is over.
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