Gas giants like the planet Jupiter are usually formed further away from the sun and then move closer to it’s orbit. It has now been researched by astronomers at the Lund University and revealed that over the last 700,000 years the planet has been moving ever inwards and has now migrated more than four times the distance that it was away from the sun.

The constant inward migration which was fueled by the gravitational pull of the sun, has been proved in theory in a complex computer simulation.
Simona Pirani, is a doctoral student in astronomy at Lund University as well as the lead author of the study which has used the evidence of the migration in the Trojan asteroids orbiting close to Jupiter to substantiate this theory in the science project.

The Trojan asteroids are two groups of thousands of asteroids  which were located at the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter. They have now positioned themselves around the planet and have the same migratory path. Gradually more than 50% of these asteroids have shifted in front of Jupiter and closer to the sun in the solar system. Leading the researchers to believe that the migration of the asteroids is similar to the journey made by the gas giant planet.