Who coined the term asteroid?
Ceres (dwarf planet)
As other objects were discovered in the neighborhood of Ceres, it was realized that Ceres represented the first of a new class of objects. In 1802, with the discovery of 2 Pallas, William Herschel coined the term "asteroid" ("star-like") for these bodies, writing that "they resemble small stars so much as hardly to be distinguished from them, even by very good telescopes". As the first such body to be discovered, Ceres was given the designation 1 Ceres under the modern system of minor-planet designations. By the 1860s, the existence of a fundamental difference between asteroids such as Ceres and the major planets was widely accepted, though a precise definition of "planet" was never formulated.
Asteroid family
The Japanese astronomer Kiyotsugu Hirayama (1874–1943) pioneered the estimation of proper elements for asteroids, and first identified several of the most prominent families in 1918. In his honor, asteroid families are sometimes called Hirayama families. This particularly applies to the five prominent groupings discovered by him.
Seiichi Tejima
Tejima was also one of the many co-founders of what is today Kyoritsu Women's University. The asteroid 8731 Tejima was named after him.
Leonid Elenin
The first asteroid discovered by Leonid Elenin was 2008 XE on 1 December 2008 at Tzec (H10). The first Amor asteroid (near-Earth object) discovered by Elenin was on 10 September 2010 at ISON-NM (H15).
Alban Berg
The asteroid 4528 Berg is named after him (1983).
Amor asteroid
The Amor asteroids are a group of near-Earth asteroids named after the archetype object 1221 Amor. The orbital perihelion of these objects is close to, but greater than, the orbital aphelion of Earth (i.e., the objects do not cross Earth's orbit), with most Amors crossing the orbit of Mars. The Amor asteroid 433 Eros was the first asteroid to be orbited and landed upon by a robotic space probe (NEAR Shoemaker).
Asteroid
In 1891, Max Wolf pioneered the use of astrophotography to detect asteroids, which appeared as short streaks on long-exposure photographic plates. This dramatically increased the rate of detection compared with earlier visual methods: Wolf alone discovered 248 asteroids, beginning with 323 Brucia, whereas only slightly more than 300 had been discovered up to that point. It was known that there were many more, but most astronomers did not bother with them, calling them "vermin of the skies", a phrase variously attributed to Eduard Suess and Edmund Weiss. Even a century later, only a few thousand asteroids were identified, numbered and named.
2423 Ibarruri
The asteroid was discovered by Russian–Ukrainian astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravleva at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyj, on 14 July 1972. It was named after Spanish communist Rubén Ruiz Ibárruri.
24626 Astrowizard
24626 Astrowizard, provisional designation "", is a dark background asteroid from the central regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 7 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 9 October 1980, by American astronomer couple Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory in California, United States. The asteroid was named for American science educator David Rodrigues.
Max Wolf
In 1891, Wolf discovered his first asteroid, 323 Brucia, and named it after Catherine Wolfe Bruce. He pioneered the use of astrophotographic techniques to automate the discovery of asteroids, as opposed to older visual methods, as a result of which asteroid discovery rates sharply increased. In time-exposure photographs, asteroids appear as short streaks due to their planetary motion with respect to fixed stars. Wolf discovered more than 200 asteroids in his lifetime.
2873 Binzel
2873 Binzel, provisional designation , is a stony Florian asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 6.5 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 28 March 1982, by American astronomer Edward Bowell at the Anderson Mesa Station in Flagstaff, Arizona. The asteroid was named after astronomer Richard Binzel.
Asteroid
Many asteroids have been placed in groups and families based on their orbital characteristics. Apart from the broadest divisions, it is customary to name a group of asteroids after the first member of that group to be discovered. Groups are relatively loose dynamical associations, whereas families are tighter and result from the catastrophic break-up of a large parent asteroid sometime in the past. Families are more common and easier to identify within the main asteroid belt, but several small families have been reported among the Jupiter trojans. Main belt families were first recognized by Kiyotsugu Hirayama in 1918 and are often called Hirayama families in his honor.
Walter Scott Houston
The main-belt asteroid 3031 Houston, discovered by Edward Bowell at Anderson Mesa Station in 1984, was named in his honor. The "Walter Scott Houston Award" of the North East Region Astronomical League, was also named after him. In 1974 he was the recipient of the Astronomical League Award at the National A.L. Meeting in East Lansing, Michigan where he was also the main speaker.
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers
On March 28, 1802, Olbers discovered and named the asteroid Pallas. Five years later, on March 29, 1807, he discovered the asteroid Vesta, which he allowed Carl Friedrich Gauss to name. As the word "asteroid" was not yet coined, the literature of the time referred to these minor planets as planets in their own right. He proposed that the asteroid belt, where these objects lay, was the remnants of a planet that had been destroyed. The current view of most scientists is that tidal effects from the planet Jupiter disrupted the planet-formation process in the asteroid belt. On March 6, 1815, Olbers discovered a periodic comet, now named after him (formally designated 13P/Olbers). Olbers' paradox, described by him in 1823 (and then reformulated in 1826), states that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the supposition of an infinite and eternal static universe.
Sylvain Arend
Together with Georges Roland, he discovered the bright comet C/1956 R1 (Arend-Roland). He also discovered, or co-discovered, the periodic comets 49P/Arend-Rigaux and 50P/Arend, Nova Scuti 1952, and a number of asteroids, including notably the Amor asteroid 1916 Boreas and the Trojan asteroid 1583 Antilochus. He also discovered 1652 Hergé which is named after Hergé, the creator of "The Adventures of Tintin". The asteroid 1563 Noël is named after his son, Emanuel Arend.
Asteroid belt
Despite Herschel's coinage, for several decades it remained common practice to refer to these objects as planets and to prefix their names with numbers representing their date of discovery: 1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 3 Juno, 4 Vesta. However, in 1845 astronomers detected a fifth object (5 Astraea) and, shortly thereafter, new objects were found at an accelerating rate. Counting them among the planets became increasingly cumbersome. Eventually, they were dropped from the planet list (as first suggested by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1850s) and Herschel's choice of nomenclature, "asteroids", gradually came into common use.
622 Esther
The asteroid is named after the biblical figure Esther.
6805 Abstracta
It was discovered on 24 September 1960, by Dutch astronomer couple Ingrid and Cornelis van Houten at Leiden, on photographic plates taken by Dutch–American astronomer Tom Gehrels at Palomar Observatory in California, United States. The asteroid was named for the astronomical bibliography Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts.
Meteoroid
In 1961, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined a meteoroid as "a solid object moving in interplanetary space, of a size considerably smaller than an asteroid and considerably larger than an atom". In 1995, Beech and Steel, writing in the "Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society", proposed a new definition where a meteoroid would be between 100 µm and across. In 2010, following the discovery of asteroids below 10 m in size, Rubin and Grossman proposed a revision of the previous definition of meteoroid to objects between 10 µm and in diameter in order to maintain the distinction. According to Rubin and Grossman, the minimum size of an asteroid is given by what can be discovered from Earth-bound telescopes, so the distinction between meteoroid and asteroid is fuzzy. Some of the smallest asteroids discovered (based on absolute magnitude "H") are with "H" = 33.2 and with "H" = 32.1 both with an estimated size of . In April 2017, the IAU adopted an official revision of its definition, limiting size to between 30 µm and one meter in diameter, but allowing for a deviation for any object causing a meteor.
Miguel Itzigsohn
Miguel Itzigsohn (1908–1978) was an Argentine astronomer and observer of comets, credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 15 asteroids between 1948 and 1954. The outer main-belt asteroid 1596 Itzigsohn, which he discovered himself, was named in his memory on 1 August 1980 ().
58097 Alimov
The asteroid was discovered on 26 October 1976, by Russian astronomer Tamara Smirnova at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyj, on the Crimean peninsula. It was later named after Russian ecologist Alexandr Alimov.
5951 Alicemonet
5951 Alicemonet, provisional designation , is a stony Flora asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 6 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 7 October 1986, by American astronomer Edward Bowell at Anderson Mesa Station of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The asteroid was named after American astronomer Alice Monet.
Astronomical spectroscopy
Asteroids can be classified into three major types according to their spectra. The original categories were created by Clark R. Chapman, David Morrison, and Ben Zellner in 1975, and further expanded by David J. Tholen in 1984. In what is now known as the Tholen classification, the C-types are made of carbonaceous material, S-types consist mainly of silicates, and X-types are 'metallic'. There are other classifications for unusual asteroids. C- and S-type asteroids are the most common asteroids. In 2002 the Tholen classification was further "evolved" into the SMASS classification, expanding the number of categories from 14 to 26 to account for more precise spectroscopic analysis of the asteroids.
Luboš Kohoutek
He has also discovered numerous asteroids, including the Apollo asteroid 1865 Cerberus. The main-belt asteroid 1850 Kohoutek was named after him.
719 Albert
719 Albert, provisional designation , is a stony asteroid, approximately 2.5 kilometers in diameter, classified as a near-Earth object of the Amor group of asteroids. It was discovered by Austrian astronomer Johann Palisa at the Vienna Observatory on 3 October 1911, and subsequently a lost minor planet for 89 years. The asteroid was named in memory of Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild, an Austrian philanthropist and banker. "Albert" was the second Amor asteroid discovered, the first being 433 Eros.
Lodewijk van den Berg
On September 28, 2007 the main belt asteroid 11430 (9560 P-L) was named after him and is now known as 11430 Lodewijkberg. The asteroid was discovered October 17, 1960 by Cornelis Johannes van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld at Leiden Observatory, where they were studying photographic plates taken by Tom Gehrels using the Palomar Observatory's Samuel Oschin telescope.
Asteroids (video game)
Asteroids is an arcade space shooter released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. and designed by Lyle Rains, Ed Logg, and Dominic Walsh. The player controls a spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy asteroids and saucers while not colliding with either or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.
25924 Douglasadams
25924 Douglasadams, provisional designation , is a Nysian asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 2.4 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 19 February 2001, by astronomers of the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research at the Lincoln Laboratory's Experimental Test Site in New Mexico, United States. The asteroid was named for novelist Douglas Adams.
Charles Hugh Smiley
Charles Hugh Smiley (September 6, 1903 – July 26, 1977) was an American astronomer and academic, and the author of column on astronomy, “Planets and Stars” ("Providence Journal", 1938-1957). The main belt asteroid 1613 Smiley is named after him. He was considered “one of the world’s leading authorities on eclipses.”
Alexander Nikolaevich Deutsch
He was active 1935–1985 as A. N. Deutsch (A. Deutsch published starting in 1926 and could be the same person). He discovered one asteroid (the Minor Planet Center lists him as A. Deutsch).
MDM Observatory
The asteroid 4432 McGraw-Hill is named after this telescope. It was discovered on March 2, 1981 by Schelte J. Bus at Siding Spring in the course of the UK Schmidt-Caltech Asteroid Survey. On February 18, 1992, the International Astronomical Union officially assigned the name "McGraw-Hill" to the asteroid. The text of the citation, as officially published by IAU Commission 20 (), is as follows:
Carlos Torres (astronomer)
Carlos Torres (1929–2011) was a Chilean astronomer of the University of Chile and an individual member of the International Astronomical Union on several commissions. Between 1968 and 1982, he discovered or co-discovered a number of asteroids from the University of Chile's Cerro El Roble Astronomical Station. Together with Spanish astronomer Carlos Guillermo Torres (1910–1965), he was honored with the naming of asteroid 1769 Carlostorres.
Asteroid
In 2006, the term "small Solar System body" was also introduced to cover both most minor planets and comets. Other languages prefer "planetoid" (Greek for "planet-like"), and this term is occasionally used in English especially for larger minor planets such as the dwarf planets as well as an alternative for asteroids since they are not star-like. The word "planetesimal" has a similar meaning, but refers specifically to the small building blocks of the planets that existed when the Solar System was forming. The term "planetule" was coined by the geologist William Daniel Conybeare to describe minor planets, but is not in common use. The three largest objects in the asteroid belt, Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta, grew to the stage of protoplanets. Ceres is a dwarf planet, the only one in the inner Solar System.
Atira asteroid
There is no standard name for the class. The name "Apohele" was proposed by the discoverers of , and is the Hawaiian word for orbit; it was chosen partially because of its similarity to the words "aphelion (apoapsis)" and "helios". Other authors adopted the designation "Inner Earth Objects" (IEOs). Still others, following the general practice to name a new class of asteroids for the first recognized member of that class, use the designation "Atira asteroids".
1925 Franklin-Adams
It was discovered on 9 September 1934, by Dutch astronomer Hendrik van Gent at the Leiden Southern Station, annex to the Johannesburg Observatory in South Africa. The asteroid was named after English amateur astronomer John Franklin-Adams.
3067 Akhmatova
The asteroid discovered on 14 October 1982, by Soviet–Russian astronomers Lyudmila Zhuravleva and Lyudmila Karachkina at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, Nauchnyj, on the Crimean peninsula. It was named after Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.
2 Pallas
In 1801, the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered an object which he initially believed to be a comet. Shortly thereafter he announced his observations of this object, noting that the slow, uniform motion was uncharacteristic of a comet, suggesting it was a different type of object. This was lost from sight for several months, but was recovered later that year by the Baron von Zach and Heinrich W. M. Olbers after a preliminary orbit was computed by Carl Friedrich Gauss. This object came to be named Ceres, and was the first asteroid to be discovered.
Hermann Kobold
From 1908 to 1938 he was the publisher of the astronomy journal Astronomische Nachrichten. An asteroid discovered by Karl William Reinmuth received the name in Kobold's honor in the 1930s.
Yao Beina
On April 9, 2015, according to the news released by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the asteroid "41981" was named after Yao Beina. The asteroid was discovered by William Kwong Yu Yeung in 2000, an amateur astronomer from Hong Kong. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) named the asteroid "Yaobeina", which was suggested by Yeung in memory of the singer. NASA describes Yao Beina in its website as "Yaobeina (1981–2015) was a talented and courageous Chinese singer who won numerous awards for the best Chinese pop song performance. One of Yao's songs, "Fire of the Heart", was about the reflections on her battle with breast cancer.
2029 Binomi
The asteroid was discovered on 11 September 1969, by Paul Wild at Zimmerwald Observatory near Bern, Switzerland. It was named for the fictitious mathematician "Alessandro Binomi" who invented the binomial formula.
Asteroid spectral types
In 1973, astronomers Clark R. Chapman, David Morrison, and Ben Zellner developed a simple taxonomic system for asteroids based on color, albedo, and spectral shape. The three categories were labelled "C" for dark carbonaceous objects, "S" for stony (silicaceous) objects, and "U" for those that did not fit into either C or S. This basic division of asteroid spectra has since been expanded and clarified. A number of classification schemes are currently in existence, and while they strive to retain some mutual consistency, quite a few asteroids are sorted into different classes depending on the particular scheme. This is due to the use of different criteria for each approach. The two most widely used classifications are described below:
62 Erato
Erato is the first asteroid to have been credited with co-discoverers, Oskar Lesser and Wilhelm Forster, who discovered it on 14 September 1860, from the Berlin Observatory. It was their first and only asteroid discovery. The name was chosen by Johann Franz Encke, director of the observatory, and refers to Erato, the Muse of lyric poetry in Greek mythology. It has also been classified as an Eoan asteroid.
1462 Zamenhof
1462 Zamenhof, provisional designation , is a carbonaceous Themistian asteroid from the outer regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 27 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 6 February 1938, by Finnish astronomer Yrjö Väisälä at the Iso-Heikkilä Observatory in Finland. The asteroid was named after L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. It is a recognized Zamenhof-Esperanto object.
Leo Anton Karl de Ball
Leo Anton Karl de Ball (November 23, 1853 – December 12, 1916) was a German-Austrian astronomer. He is credited by the Minor Planet Center as "K. de Ball" for his (sole) asteroid discovery, but seems to be best known as Leo de Ball.
2980 Cameron
The asteroid was named after astrophysicist and cosmogonist Alastair G. W. Cameron (1925–2005), who was associate director for theoretical astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He was an early advocate of the concepts of a turbulent accretion disk solar nebula, and of the origin of the Moon by a giant impact on the proto-Earth. He also studied the nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, and the cosmic abundances of nuclides.
Eduard Suess
His son, Franz Eduard Suess (1867–1942), was superintendent and geologist at the "Imperial Geological Institute" in Vienna, who studied moldavites and coined the term tektite. The asteroid 12002 Suess, discovered by Czech astronomers Petr Pravec and Lenka Kotková in 1996, was named in his honor.
Astrological symbols
The modern astrological symbol for Vesta was created by Eleanor Bach, who is credited with pioneering the use of the Big Four asteroids with the publication of her "Ephemerides of the Asteroids". Bach's symbol for Vesta is a simplified version of other representations of Vesta's altar. The original form of the symbol for Vesta, , was created by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Olbers, having previously discovered and named one new planet (as the asteroids were then classified), gave Gauss the honor of naming his newest discovery. Gauss decided to name the planet for the goddess Vesta, and also specified that the symbol should be the altar of the goddess with the sacred fire burning on it.
Schelte J. Bus
In 1981, Bus discovered periodic comet 87P/Bus. Since 1975, he has also discovered or co-discovered over a thousand asteroids, including: an Apollo asteroid, 2135 Aristaeus, which will come within 13 lunar distances of the Earth on 30 March 2147; an Amor asteroid; and more than 40 Jupiter trojans. The first of these was 3240 Laocoon, which he co-discovered with Eleanor F. Helin. Bus was also the discoverer of asteroids 5020 Asimov and 4923 Clarke, named after two Science Fiction writers "(see and )".
1003 Lilofee
The asteroid was named by the discoverer (). The name was proposed by ARI-astronomer Johannes Riem, after whom 1025 Riema was named. The official naming citation was also mentioned in "The Names of the Minor Planets" by Paul Herget in 1955 ().
Apollo asteroid
The Apollo asteroids are a group of near-Earth asteroids named after 1862 Apollo, discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s. They are Earth-crossing asteroids that have an orbital semi-major axis greater than that of the Earth (> 1 AU) but perihelion distances less than the Earth's aphelion distance (q < 1.017 AU).
253 Mathilde
Among his discoveries was the asteroid 253 Mathilde, found on November 12, 1885. The initial orbital elements of the asteroid were then computed by V. A. Lebeuf, another Austrian astronomer working at the Paris Observatory. The name of the asteroid was suggested by Lebeuf, after Mathilde, the wife of Moritz Loewy—who was the vice director of the observatory in Paris.
Asteroid spectral types
The most widely used taxonomy for over a decade has been that of David J. Tholen, first proposed in 1984. This classification was developed from broad band spectra (between 0.31 μm and 1.06 μm) obtained during the Eight-Color Asteroid Survey (ECAS) in the 1980s, in combination with albedo measurements. The original formulation was based on 978 asteroids. The Tholen scheme includes 14 types with the majority of asteroids falling into one of three broad categories, and several smaller types "(also see above)". The types are, with their largest exemplars in parenthesis:
1681 Steinmetz
1681 Steinmetz, provisional designation , is a stony asteroid from the central region of the asteroid belt, approximately 16 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 23 November 1948, by French astronomer Marguerite Laugier at Nice Observatory in south-eastern France. It was named after German amateur astronomer Julius Steinmetz.
Asteroid belt
Accordingly, in 1802, William Herschel suggested they be placed into a separate category, named "asteroids", after the Greek "asteroeides", meaning "star-like". Upon completing a series of observations of Ceres and Pallas, he concluded,
Archaeoastronomy
The term "archaeoastronomy" was first used by Elizabeth Chesley Baity (at the suggestion of Euan MacKie) in 1973, but as a topic of study it may be much older, depending on how archaeoastronomy is defined. Clive Ruggles says that Heinrich Nissen, working in the mid-nineteenth century was arguably the first archaeoastronomer. Rolf Sinclair says that Norman Lockyer, working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, could be called the 'father of archaeoastronomy'. Euan MacKie would place the origin even later, stating: "...the genesis and modern flowering of archaeoastronomy must surely lie in the work of Alexander Thom in Britain between the 1930s and the 1970s".
In the 1960s the work of the engineer Alexander Thom and that of the astronomer Gerald Hawkins, who proposed that Stonehenge was a Neolithic computer, inspired new interest in the astronomical features of ancient sites. The claims of Hawkins were largely dismissed, but this was not the case for Alexander Thom's work, whose survey results of megalithic sites hypothesized widespread practice of accurate astronomy in the British Isles. Euan MacKie, recognizing that Thom's theories needed to be tested, excavated at the Kintraw standing stone site in Argyllshire in 1970 and 1971 to check whether the latter's prediction of an observation platform on the hill slope above the stone was correct. There was an artificial platform there and this apparent verification of Thom's long alignment hypothesis (Kintraw was diagnosed as an accurate winter solstice site) led him to check Thom's geometrical theories at the Cultoon stone circle in Islay, also with a positive result. MacKie therefore broadly accepted Thom's conclusions and published new prehistories of Britain. In contrast a re-evaluation of Thom's fieldwork by Clive Ruggles argued that Thom's claims of high accuracy astronomy were not fully supported by the evidence. Nevertheless, Thom's legacy remains strong, Krupp wrote in 1979, "Almost singlehandedly he has established the standards for archaeo-astronomical fieldwork and interpretation, and his amazing results have stirred controversy during the last three decades." His influence endures and practice of statistical testing of data remains one of the methods of archaeoastronomy.
1147 Stavropolis
1147 Stavropolis, provisional designation , is a stony asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 14 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 11 June 1929, by Georgian–Russian astronomer Grigory Neujmin at the Simeiz Observatory on the Crimean peninsula. The asteroid was named after the Russian city of Stavropol.
1421 Esperanto
This minor planet was named by the discoverer after the artificial language, Esperanto, which was created by inventor and writer, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (1859–1917), who used the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto". The discoverer also named another asteroid, 1462 Zamenhof, directly after the inventor. Both asteroids are considered to be the most remote Zamenhof-Esperanto objects. The official was published by the Minor Planet Center before November 1977 ().
Alfred Schmitt
In 1932, Schmitt discovered an asteroid while working at the Algiers Observatory and named it in honor of his colleague, Louis Boyer – asteroid 1215 Boyer.
16 Psyche
The first fifteen asteroids to be discovered were given symbols by astronomers as a type of shorthand notation. Psyche was given an iconic symbol, as were several other asteroids discovered over the next few years. The symbol , a semicircle topped by a star, represents a butterfly's wing, symbol of the soul ("psyche" is the Greek word for 'soul'), and a star. In 1851, German astronomer J. F. Encke suggested using a circled number, and 16 Psyche was the first new asteroid to be discovered that was designated using this scheme when American astronomer James Ferguson published his observations in 1852.
Asteroids in fiction
The earliest explicit references to asteroids date from the late nineteenth century:
8187 Akiramisawa
It was discovered by Japanese astronomer Satoru Otomo at Kiyosato Observatory () on 15 December 1992. The asteroid was named after Japanese botanist Akira Misawa.
Asteroid Day
Asteroid Day was co-founded by filmmaker Grigorij Richters, B612 Foundation COO Danica Remy, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Brian May, Queen guitarist and astrophysicist. Over 200 astronauts, scientists, technologists and artists, including Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, Peter Gabriel, Jim Lovell, Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins, Alexei Leonov, Bill Anders, Kip Thorne, Lord Martin Rees, Chris Hadfield, Rusty Schweickart and Brian Cox co-signed the Asteroid Day Declaration. Asteroid Day was officially launched on December 3, 2014. In February 2014, Brian May, astrophysicist and guitarist for the rock band Queen, began working with Grigorij Richters, director of the film 51 Degrees North, the story of a fictional asteroid impact on London and the human condition resulting from such an event. May composed the music for the film. After screening the film at the 2014 Starmus Festival, Richters and May co-founded Asteroid Day in October 2014 which they officially announced during a press conference with Lord Martin Rees, Rusty Schweickart, Ed Lu, Thomas Jones, Ryan Watt and Bill Nye. The event was live streamed from the Science Museum in London, the California Academy of Sciences, New York and São Paulo. On Asteroid Day 2017, minor planet 248750 (discoverer M. Dawson) was officially named Asteroidday by the International Astronomical Union.
Asteroid
The two most widely used taxonomies now used are the Tholen classification and SMASS classification. The former was proposed in 1984 by David J. Tholen, and was based on data collected from an eight-color asteroid survey performed in the 1980s. This resulted in 14 asteroid categories. In 2002, the Small Main-Belt Asteroid Spectroscopic Survey resulted in a modified version of the Tholen taxonomy with 24 different types. Both systems have three broad categories of C, S, and X asteroids, where X consists of mostly metallic asteroids, such as the M-type. There are also several smaller classes.
Asteroid belt
The semi-major axis of an asteroid is used to describe the dimensions of its orbit around the Sun, and its value determines the minor planet's orbital period. In 1866, Daniel Kirkwood announced the discovery of gaps in the distances of these bodies' orbits from the Sun. They were located in positions where their period of revolution about the Sun was an integer fraction of Jupiter's orbital period. Kirkwood proposed that the gravitational perturbations of the planet led to the removal of asteroids from these orbits.
1889 Pakhmutova
It was discovered by Russian astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyj on 24 January 1968. The asteroid was named after Russian composer Aleksandra Pakhmutova.
14827 Hypnos
The asteroid was discovered by American astronomer couple Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory in California on 5 May 1986. It was named after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.
6470 Aldrin
He was one of the first two humans to land on the Moon, and the second person to walk on it, following Neil Armstrong, after whom the asteroid 6469 Armstrong is named. Its name was suggested by Czech astronomers Jana Tichá, Miloš Tichý and Zdeněk Moravec, who observed the asteroid during its 1995-opposition, shortly before being numbered. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 4 May 1999 ().
3771 Alexejtolstoj
3771 Alexejtolstoj, provisional designation , is a stony Flora asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 3.7 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 20 September 1974, by Russian–Ukrainian astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravleva at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyj on the Crimean peninsula. The asteroid was named after writer Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
Definition of planet
Herschel suggested that these four worlds be given their own separate classification, asteroids (meaning "starlike" since they were too small for their disks to resolve and thus resembled stars), though most astronomers preferred to refer to them as planets. This conception was entrenched by the fact that, due to the difficulty of distinguishing asteroids from yet-uncharted stars, those four remained the only asteroids known until 1845. Science textbooks in 1828, after Herschel's death, still numbered the asteroids among the planets. With the arrival of more refined star charts, the search for asteroids resumed, and a fifth and sixth were discovered by Karl Ludwig Hencke in 1845 and 1847. By 1851 the number of asteroids had increased to 15, and a new method of classifying them, by affixing a number before their names in order of discovery, was adopted, inadvertently placing them in their own distinct category. Ceres became "(1) Ceres", Pallas became "(2) Pallas", and so on. By the 1860s, the number of known asteroids had increased to over a hundred, and observatories in Europe and the United States began referring to them collectively as "minor planets", or "small planets", though it took the first four asteroids longer to be grouped as such. To this day, "minor planet" remains the official designation for all small bodies in orbit around the Sun, and each new discovery is numbered accordingly in the IAU's Minor Planet Catalogue.
Asteroid
In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported "It's 100 percent certain we'll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we're not 100 percent sure when." Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking,
in his final book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions", considered an asteroid collision to be the biggest threat to the planet. In June 2018, the US National Science and Technology Council warned that America is unprepared for an asteroid impact event, and has developed and released the ""National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy Action Plan"" to better prepare. According to expert testimony in the United States Congress in 2013, NASA would require at least five years of preparation before a mission to intercept an asteroid could be launched.
271 Penthesilea
Penthesilea (minor planet designation: 271 Penthesilea) is a large main belt asteroid that was discovered by Viktor Knorre on 13 October 1887 in Berlin. It was his last asteroid discovery. The asteroid was named after Penthesilea, the mythical Greek queen of the Amazons.
Otto Kippes
Otto Kippes (1905–1994) was a German Catholic priest and amateur astronomer. He was acknowledged especially for his work in asteroid orbit calculations, which brought him the Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1991. In 1959, the Berlin Academy of Sciences awarded him the Leibniz Medal for his contributions in the identification of minor planets. The main belt asteroid 1780 Kippes was named in his honour. Kippes in turn had successfully proposed to name several asteroids after fellow amateur astronomers.
2029 Binomi
This minor planet was named for the fictitious mathematician "Alessandro Binomi", inventor of the binomial formula. This act of parody science was common among students at German-speaking universities (). The real inventors of the binomial formula are the Bernoullis, after whom the asteroid 2034 Bernoulli was named. The approved naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 1 August 1981 ().
Aleksandr Leonidovich Zaitsev
In June 1995, Zaitsev was responsible for initiating the world's first intercontinental radar astronomy experiment; the radar groups participating in this experiment were led by Steven Ostro at JPL, Zaitsev in Yevpatoria, and Yasuhiro Koyama in Kashima, Japan. Ostro's group transmitted and received using the Goldstone site of the Deep Space Network, while Zaitsev received using the Yevpatoria site and Koyama's group received at Kashima. The target asteroid, 6489 Golevka, was later named for the participating observatories (GOL-EV-KA or GOLdstone-EVpatoria-KAshima). Zaitsev has also conducted work on using radar to determine the composition of asteroids and planetary bodies.
851 Zeissia
The asteroid is named after the German optician and company founder Carl Zeiss.
Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters
Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters (September 19, 1813 – July 18, 1890) was a German–American astronomer, and a pioneer in the study of asteroids.
Macrolife
Scientist Dandridge M. Cole originated the term "Macro Life" in his 1961 book "The Ultimate Human Society", though the idea of using asteroids as mobile "societal containers" is a common theme in science, and science fiction.
N. R. Pogson
Pogson was married in London in 1849 to Elizabeth Jane Ambrose, by whom he had 11 children. She died on 5 November 1869. On 25 October 1883 he married Edith Louisa Stopford Sibley in Madras, daughter of Charles W. Sibley of the 64th regiment and a widow, aged 33, by whom he had a further three children: Frederick Vere (born in 1885), Edith Vera (born in 1886; died in infancy) and Edith Gladys, born in 1889. The asteroid Vera, first discovered by Pogson on 6 February 1885, was named at the suggestion of his second wife, Edith Pogson.. Edith outlived him and retired to Wimbledon where she died on 31 December 1946.
Julio Ángel Fernández
In 2006, Fernández was one of a number of dissenters at the IAU's meeting to establish the first definition of "planet." As an alternative to the IAU's draft proposal, which had included Pluto, its moon Charon and Ceres among the planets, Fernández with his Uruguayan colleague Gonzalo Tancredi proposed a definition where they reserved the term "planet" only for those objects in the Solar System which had cleared their neighbourhoods of planetesimals, describing those objects which had not cleared their orbits yet retained a spherical shape as "planetoids." The IAU's final definition incorporated much of Fernández and Tancredi's proposal, though the objects were christened "dwarf planets."
The event originated the word "Plutoed" that was selected as the "word of the year 2006" by the American Dialect Society.
Paul Steinhardt
In condensed matter physics and geophysics: Steinhardt and his then-student Dov Levine invented the theoretical concept of quasicrystals, and even introduced the term "quasicrystal" to the lexicon. The two were also the first to correctly identify a puzzling aluminum-manganese alloy with icosahedral symmetry announced by Dan Shechtman and collaborators in 1984 as the first example of a quasicrystal to be made in a laboratory. The following decade, Steinhardt launched a worldwide search for a quasicrystal formed by a natural geophysical or astrophysical process; his team eventually discovered a candidate in a Florentine museum collection. Their discovery was recognized by the International Mineralogical Association as the first natural quasicrystal, and they accepted the team's proposed name for it, icosahedrite. Over the next year, disparate clues were pieced together about its origin, finally pointing to a remote mountain range in Chukotka, on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. Two years later, Steinhardt initiated his first-ever field expedition, and led a team of geologists to the region. As a result of that expedition—and nearly three decades after first inventing the concept of this entirely new form of matter—Steinhardt managed to discover the first quasicrystal formed through a natural process, which his team later proved was part of a 4.5 billion year old meteorite. They also discovered a second quasicrystal named decagonite, along with a new crystalline mineral that was named steinhardtite, in his honor.
Spaceguard
Arthur C. Clarke coined the term in his novel "Rendezvous with Rama" (1972) where "Project Spaceguard" was the name of an early warning system created following a fictional catastrophic asteroid impact. This name was later adopted by a number of real life efforts to discover and study near-Earth objects. The name was used for the Survey "with the permission and encouragement of Clarke."
A 1992 US Congressional study produced a "Spaceguard Survey Report" which led to a mandate that NASA locate 90% of near-Earth asteroids larger than 1 km within 10 years. This is often referred to as the "Spaceguard Goal." A number of efforts which receive money through NASA are all considered to be working on the "Spaceguard Project."
Douglas ReVelle
An asteroid was named in his honor, 13358 Revelle, with the dedication: “Douglas O. ReVelle, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is well known for his pioneering theoretical work in meteor physics and astronomy based on theoretical aerodynamics, in meteor acoustics and in the interpretation of infrasonic meteor observations. The name was suggested by Z. Ceplecha.”
Yrjö Väisälä
Yrjö Väisälä is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 128 asteroids during 1935–1944. He used to name them with the names of his personal friends that had birthdays. One of them was the professor , after whom an asteroid 1548 Palomaa was named. For this reason the Palomar Mountain Observatory in California has never had an asteroid bearing its name – the rules for naming asteroids state that the names have to differ from each other with more than one letter.
7187 Isobe
The asteroid has been named after Syuzo Isobe (born 1942), a Japanese scientist at NAOJ, individual member of the IAU, and president of the Japan Spaceguard Association. He significantly contributed in establishing the Bisei Spaceguard Center, an observatory designed for the observation of NEOs and earth-orbiting space debris. The approved naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 1 November 2001 ().
Erwin Obermair
Erwin Obermair (29 August 1946 in Hargelsberg – 15 January 2017 in Linz) was an Austrian amateur astronomer and co-discoverer of asteroids.
Asteroid
The United Nations declared 30 June as International Asteroid Day to educate the public about asteroids. The date of International Asteroid Day commemorates the anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid impact over Siberia, Russian Federation, on 30 June 1908.
Bakhchysarai
An asteroid, 3242 Bakhchisaraj, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979, takes its name after the town.
170 Maria
Maria (minor planet designation: 170 Maria) is a Main belt asteroid that was discovered by French astronomer Henri Joseph Perrotin on January 10, 1877. Its orbit was computed by Antonio Abetti, and the asteroid was named after his sister, Maria. This is the namesake of the Maria asteroid family; one of the first asteroid families to be identified by Japanese astronomer Kiyotsugu Hirayama in 1918.
1910 Mikhailov
The asteroid was named in honor of prominent Russian astronomer Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Mikhailov (1888–1983), a gravimetrist and academician, who was vice-president of the International Astronomical Union, director of the Pulkovo Observatory, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and president of its Astronomical Council.
1869 Philoctetes
It was discovered on September 24, 1960, by the Dutch and Dutch–American astronomers Cornelis van Houten, Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld and Tom Gehrels at Palomar Observatory on Palomar Mountain, California. The asteroid was named after Philoctetes from Greek mythology. On the same night, the same group also discovered 1868 Thersites.
Richard P. Binzel
Richard "Rick" P. Binzel (born 1958) is an American astronomer and professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a discoverer of minor planets, photometrist and the inventor of the Torino Scale, a method for categorizing the impact hazard associated with near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets.
Planets in astrology
Some asteroids such as Pallas () and Vesta (), as well as dwarf planet Ceres, can sometimes be seen with binoculars (Vesta even with the naked eye), but these were not recognized as planetary, and perhaps not even noticed, until the early 19th century. In the early 19th century, Ceres, Juno (), and the other two aforementioned asteroids were for a time regarded as planets. Although asteroids have been known to both astronomers and astrologers for more than 200 years, they are often ignored by astrologers. The tradition of some astrologers casting charts with minor planets originates with these asteroids. Since the discovery of Chiron () in the 1970s, some astrologers have been casting the new "planet", although astronomers consider it a centaur (a kind of intermediate object between comet and asteroid).
Asteroid
The first asteroids to be discovered were assigned iconic symbols like the ones traditionally used to designate the planets. By 1855 there were two dozen asteroid symbols, which often occurred in multiple variants.
Asteroid
Asteroids are minor planets, especially of the inner Solar System. Larger asteroids have also been called planetoids. These terms have historically been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not resemble a planet-like disc and was not observed to have characteristics of an active comet such as a tail. As minor planets in the outer Solar System were discovered they were typically found to have volatile-rich surfaces similar to comets. As a result, they were often distinguished from objects found in the main asteroid belt. In this article, the term "asteroid" refers to the minor planets of the inner Solar System including those co-orbital with Jupiter.
Joseph I. Goldstein
The asteroid 4989 Joegoldstein was named after Goldstein in 2000 by Schelte J. Bus, who had discovered the asteroid in 1981 at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. It was named in honor of Goldstein because of his outstanding contributions to the science of meteoritics.
Peter H. Schultz
His contribution to cratering phenomena experimentally and in the field was recognized with the naming of the asteroid 16592 PeteSchultz in his honor. On the BBC Horizon programme on asteroids, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", first broadcast in 2010, Schultz jokes about the possibility that his asteroid might collide with Earth: "It's a bullet with my name on it."
1671 Chaika
This minor planet was named in honor of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina "Chaika" Tereshkova (born 1937). Tereshkova received the call sign "Chaika" – the Russian word for seagull – as she was as the first woman to fly in space. The asteroid's name was proposed by the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (ITA) in St Petersburg. The official was published by the Minor Planet Center before November 1977 ().
Aleksandr Andronov
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Andronov (; , Moscow – October 31, 1952, Gorky) was a Soviet physicist and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1946). He worked extensively on the theory of stability of dynamical systems, introducing (together with Lev Pontryagin) the notion of structural stability. In that context, he also contributed to the mathematical theory of self-oscillation (a term that he coined) by establishing a link between the generation of oscillations and the theory of Lyapunov stability. He developed the comprehensive theory of self-oscillations by linking it with the qualitative theory of differential equations, topology, and with the general theory of stability of motion. The crater Andronov on the Moon is named after him.
Near-Earth object
The first astronomical program dedicated to the discovery of near-Earth asteroids was the Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey, started in 1973 by astronomers Eugene Shoemaker and Eleanor Helin. The link to impact hazard, the need for dedicated survey telescopes and options to head off an eventual impact were first discussed at a 1981 interdisciplinary conference in Snowmass, Colorado. Plans for a more comprehensive survey, named the Spaceguard Survey, were developed by NASA from 1992, under a mandate from the United States Congress. To promote the survey on an international level, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organised a workshop at Vulcano, Italy in 1995, and set up the Spaceguard Foundation also in Italy a year later. In 1998, the United States Congress gave NASA a mandate to detect of 90% of near-earth asteroids over diameter (that threaten global devastation) by 2008.
George Takei
Upon learning of the decision to name the asteroid after him, he said, "I am now a heavenly body. I found out about it yesterday. ... I was blown away. It came out of the clear, blue sky—just like an asteroid."
Bouzaréah
Frederic Sy was a French astronomer who published scientific articles from 1894 to 1918 about comets and asteroids. He worked at the astronomical observatory the Research center in Astronomy, Astrophysique and Geophysics (CRAAG, formerly the Observatory of Algiers) and was a colleague of François Gonnessiat. He discovered two asteroids, which he named: