Austria ( minor planet designation: 136 Austria) is a

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 that was found by the prolific asteroid discoverer Johann Palisa on 18 March 1874, from the Austrian Naval Observatory in

Pola Pola or POLA may refer to: People * House of Pola, an Italian noble family * Pola Alonso (1923–2004), Argentine actress * Pola Brändle (born 1980), German artist and photographer * Pola Gauguin (1883–1961), Danish painter * Pola Gojawiczyńsk ...

, Istria. It was his first asteroid discovery and was given the Latin name of his

homeland A homeland is a place where a cultural, national, or racial identity has formed. The definition can also mean simply one's country of birth. When used as a proper noun, the Homeland, as well as its equivalents in other languages, often has ethn ...

. Based upon its spectrum, it is classified as an M-type spectrum, although Clark et al. (1994) suggest it may be more like an

S-type asteroid S-type asteroids are asteroids with a spectral type that is indicative of a siliceous (i.e. stony) mineralogical composition, hence the name. They have relatively high density. Approximately 17% of asteroids are of this type, making it the secon ...

. It shows almost no absorption features in the near infrared, which may indicate an iron or

enstatite chondrite Enstatite chondrites (E-type chondrites) are a rare form of meteorite, rich in the mineral enstatite. Only about 200 E-Type chondrites are currently known, comprising about 2% of the chondrites that fall on Earth.Norton, O.R. and Chitwood, L.A. F ...

surface composition. A weak hydration feature was detected in 2006. Photometric observations of this asteroid at the European Southern Observatory in 1981 gave 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 ...

with a period of 11.5 ± 0.1 hours and a brightness variation of 0.40 in

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 ...

. As of 2013, the estimated rotation period is 11.4969 hours.

References

External links

* * 000136 Discoveries by Johann Palisa Named minor planets 000136 000136 18740318 {{beltasteroid-stub