Scientists have discovered that an asteroid trailing behind Mars could actually be a fragment of the Moon. The space rock, which is known by the catchy name (101429) 1998 VF31, is one of a number of trojan asteroids in our solar system - objects which share the same orbital path as one of the planets. What makes this particular example so interesting, is the fact that its composition seems to hint that it may in fact be a piece of the Earth's moon which must have been chipped off during a collision at some point in the distant past before ending up trailing the orbit of Mars. Researchers at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) in Northern Ireland used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile to examine how sunlight reflects off the asteroid's surface and then compared the data to that of other bodies in the solar system. They were surprised to find that the Moon was the closest match. According to study co-author Galin Borisov, the data was a "dead