La Grange Points & Kordylewski CLouds

In celestial mechanics, the Lagrangian points are the points near two large bodies in orbit where a smaller object will maintain its position relative to the large orbiting bodies. In our local space, these are specific regions of the sky where Earth's gravitational pull is canceled out by that of the moon.

Even though we have sent spacecraft to these points, debis collecting at these spots was not previously confirmed, although scientist have speculated that such debris clouds must exist. Hungarian astronomers, however, were reported last fall to have detected several of these dust clouds, which are being referred to as 'ghost moons'.

These hazy dust conglomerates are tens of thousands of miles around, but are far too faint to be distinguished by the naked eye. 60 years ago, Kazimierz Kordylewski, a Polish astronomer reported their detection, but he was not widely heeded, and the existence of Kordylewski clouds has been a matter of controversy ever since.

Now conclusive evidence of the clouds have been obtained by Gabor Horvath and Judit Sliz-Balogh, astronomers at Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University. They used a special telescope to detect the clouds 400,000 km from Earth, at the semi-stable Lagrange points L4 and L5.