6090 Aulis, ''provisional designation'': , is a

Jupiter trojan The Jupiter trojans, commonly called trojan asteroids or simply trojans, are a large group of asteroids that share the planet Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. Relative to Jupiter, each trojan librates around one of Jupiter's stable Lagrange poin ...

from the

Greek camp This is a list of Jupiter trojans that lie in the Greek camp, an elongated curved region around the leading Lagrangian point (), 60 ° ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. All the asteroids at Jupiter's point have names corresponding to participants ...

, approximately in diameter. It was discovered on 27 February 1989, by Belgian astronomer

Henri Debehogne Henri Debehogne (30 December 1928 – 9 December 2007) was a Belgian astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets. Biography He was born at Maillen. Debehogne worked at the Royal Observatory of Belgium (french: Observatoire Royal de ...

at ESO's La Silla Observatory in northern Chile. The dark Jovian

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere. ...

belongs to the 50 largest Jupiter trojans and has a

rotation period The rotation period of a celestial object (e.g., star, gas giant, planet, moon, asteroid) may refer to its sidereal rotation period, i.e. the time that the object takes to complete a single revolution around its axis of rotation relative to the ...

of 18.5 hours. It was named for the ancient Greek port Aulis, mentioned in the '' Iliad''.

Orbit and classification

''Aulis'' is a dark Jovian

orbiting in the leading Greek camp at Jupiter's

Lagrangian point In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (; also Lagrangian points or libration points) are points of equilibrium for small-mass objects under the influence of two massive orbiting bodies. Mathematically, this involves the solution of th ...

, 60 ° ahead of the Gas Giant's orbit in a 1:1 resonance . It is also a non- family asteroid in the Jovian background population. It orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.0–5.6 AU once every 12 years and 3 months (4,470 days;

semi-major axis In geometry, the major axis of an ellipse is its longest diameter: a line segment that runs through the center and both foci, with ends at the two most widely separated points of the perimeter. The semi-major axis (major semiaxis) is the long ...

of 5.31 AU). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.06 and an inclination of 20 ° with respect to the ecliptic. The body's observation arc begins with a

precovery In astronomy, precovery (short for pre-discovery recovery) is the process of finding the image of an object in images or photographic plates predating its discovery, typically for the purpose of calculating a more accurate orbit. This happens mos ...

taken at

Palomar Observatory Palomar Observatory is an astronomical research observatory in San Diego County, California, United States, in the Palomar Mountain Range. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Research time at the observat ...

in March 1954, almost 35 years prior to its official discovery observation.

Numbering and naming

This minor planet was numbered on 19 September 1994 (). On 14 May 2021, the object was named by the Working Group Small Body Nomenclature (WGSBN) for the ancient Greek port Aulis, mentioned in the '' Iliad''. In Greek mythology, it was the place where the Greek fleet gathered to set off for Troy and where King Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.

Physical characteristics

''Aulis'' is an assumed C-type asteroid. Its V–I color index of 0.98 is typical for that of most Jovian D-types, the dominant spectral type among the larger Jupiter trojans.

Rotation period

Italian astronomer

Stefano Mottola This is a list of minor-planet discoverers credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of one or several minor planets (such as near-Earth and main-belt asteroids, Jupiter trojans and distant objects). , the discovery of 612,011 numb ...

obtained two concurring rotational lightcurves from photometric observations. In June 1994, together with astronomer Anders Erikson, he constructed a lightcurve from observations made with the 0.9-meter Dutch telescope at La Silla, showing a

of hours and a brightness variation of magnitude (). In September 2009, he used the 1.2-meter reflector at

Calar Alto Observatory The Calar Alto Observatory (Centro Astronómico Hispano en Andalucía or "Spanish Astronomical Centre in Andalusia") is an astronomical observatory located in Almería province in Spain on Calar Alto, a mountain in the Sierra de Los Filabres ra ...

, Spain, and measured a refined period of hours with an amplitude of in magnitude (), confirming his previous result.

Diameter and albedo

According to the space-based surveys carried out by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite IRAS, the Japanese Akari satellite, and the NEOWISE mission of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, ''Aulis'' measures between 59.57 and 81.92 kilometers in diameter and its surface has an albedo between 0.046 and 0.087. The ''Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link'' adopts an albedo of 0.0553 from IRAS, and derives a similar diameter of 74.53 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 9.4.

References

External links

Asteroid Lightcurve Database (LCDB)
query form

)

– Minor Planet Center
Asteroid (6090) 1989 DJ
at the Small Bodies Data Ferret * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Aulis 006090 Discoveries by Henri Debehogne Named minor planets 19890227