2 Pallas
| History of observation In 1801, astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered an asteroid that originally took for a comet. Shortly thereafter, he announced the discovery of the object whose movement slow and uniform did not correspond to that of comets and suggested it was part of a new type of object. This object was lost for a few months when he passed behind the sun, then returned several months later by Baron von Zach and Heinrich WM Olbers through a reduction of orbit calculation done by Friedrich Gauss. This object was named Ceres , and is the first asteroid discovered. A few months later, tried to locate Olbers Ceres when he noticed the presence of a moving object in the area where Ceres was supposed to be. It was the asteroid Pallas, which fortuitously passed near Ceres. The discovery of this object provoked the interest of the scientific community. Before the discovery of Ceres, astronomers speculated the presence of a planet between the orbits of March and that of Jupiter. The discovery of a second planet surprised them . The orbit of Pallas was calculated by Gauss, who found a period of 4.6 years similar to the period of Ceres. However, Pallas has a high orbital inclination to the plane of the ecliptic . In 1917 the Japanese astronomer Hirayama Kiyotsugu began to study the movement of asteroids. By rearranging the asteroids according to their orbital motion means, inclination and eccentricity, he discovered several distinct groups. In a later article, he turned the discovery of a group of three asteroids Pallas, who became associated with the Pallas family name of the largest member of the group . Since 1994, more than ten members of this family have been discovered, and its members have a semi-major axis between 2.50 and 2.82 AU and an inclination between 33 and 38 ) . The existence of this family was finally confirmed in 2002 by comparing their spectra . The first asteroid discovered have an astronomical symbol and that of Pallas is The Hubble Space Telescope has resolved the disk of Pallas September 9, 2007. MiscellaneousThe chemical element palladium (atomic number 46) was discovered in 1803 and took its name from the asteroid. See alsoRelated articlesSource
References
| |||||||||||||||||
Loading ...