Miriam (
minor planet designation: 102 Miriam) is a moderately large, very dark
main belt
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...
asteroid. It was discovered by
C. H. F. Peters on August 22, 1868, from the
Litchfield Observatory
Hamilton College is a private liberal arts college in Clinton, Oneida County, New York. It was founded as Hamilton-Oneida Academy in 1793 and was chartered as Hamilton College in 1812 in honor of inaugural trustee Alexander Hamilton, followi ...
.
Peters named the asteroid after
Miriam, the sister of
Moses in the
Old Testament. This caused some controversy, because at the time, asteroids were expected to be named after mythological figures, and the devout would not regard
Biblical figures as such. According to fellow astronomer
Edward S. Holden, Peters deliberately chose a name from the Bible so as to annoy an overly pious
theology
Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the ...
professor of his acquaintance.
Initially classified as a
D-type asteroid
D-type asteroids have a very low albedo and a featureless reddish spectrum. It has been suggested that they have a composition of organic-rich silicates, carbon and anhydrous silicates, possibly with water ice in their interiors. D-type asteroids ...
, it was later classed as C-type based upon a broad absorption feature below 4,000 Å, most likely due to
phyllosilicate
Silicate minerals are rock-forming minerals made up of silicate groups. They are the largest and most important class of minerals and make up approximately 90 percent of Earth's crust.
In mineralogy, silica (silicon dioxide, ) is usually consid ...
s on the surface.
[ An ]occultation
An occultation is an event that occurs when one object is hidden from the observer by another object that passes between them. The term is often used in astronomy, but can also refer to any situation in which an object in the foreground blocks ...
of the star HIP 37136 by 102 Miriam on February 15, 2000 was observed from multiple stations, with the chords yielding an estimated elliptical cross-section of .[
Photometric observations of this asteroid during 2007 at the Organ Mesa Observatory in ]Las Cruces, New Mexico
Las Cruces (; "the crosses") is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New Mexico and the seat of Doña Ana County. As of the 2020 census the population was 111,385. Las Cruces is the largest city in both Doña Ana County and southern Ne ...
, were used to create a light curve
In astronomy, a light curve is a graph of light intensity of a celestial object or region as a function of time, typically with the magnitude of light received on the y axis and with time on the x axis. The light is usually in a particular frequ ...
plot. This showed a rotation period of 23.613 ± 0.001 hours and a brightness variation of 0.12 ± 0.02 magnitude
Magnitude may refer to:
Mathematics
*Euclidean vector, a quantity defined by both its magnitude and its direction
*Magnitude (mathematics), the relative size of an object
*Norm (mathematics), a term for the size or length of a vector
*Order of ...
. The curve shows three maxima and minima during each cycle.[
]
References
External links
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Discoveries by Christian Peters
Named minor planets
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