14871 Pyramus, provisional designation , is a dark Zhongguo
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.
...
from the outermost region of the
asteroid 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 ...
, approximately in diameter. It was discovered on 13 October 1990 by German astronomers
Lutz Schmadel
Lutz Dieter Schmadel (2 July 1942, in Berlin – 21 October 2016) was a German astronomer and a prolific discoverer of asteroids, who worked at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ARI) of the University of Heidelberg.
His special interest was t ...
and
Freimut Börngen
Freimut Börngen (; 17 October 1930 – 19 June 2021) was a German astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets. A few sources give his first name wrongly as "Freimuth". The Minor Planet Center credits him as F. Borngen.
He studied ga ...
at the
Karl Schwarzschild Observatory
The Karl Schwarzschild Observatory (german: Karl-Schwarzschild-Observatorium) is a German astronomical observatory in Tautenburg near Jena, Thuringia.
It was founded in 1960 as an affiliated institute of the former German Academy of Sciences at ...
in Tautenburg, Germany. The asteroid was named for
Pyramus
Pyramus and Thisbe are a pair of ill-fated lovers whose story forms part of Ovid's ''Metamorphoses''. The story has since been retold by many authors.
Pyramus and Thisbe are two lovers in the city of Babylon who occupy connected houses. Their ...
from classical mythology.
Orbit and classification
''Pyramus'' is a non-
family
Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...
asteroid from the main belt's background population. It is a member of the small group of
Zhongguo asteroid A Hecuba-gap asteroid is a member of a dynamical group of resonant asteroids located in the Hecuba gap at 3.27 AU – one of the largest Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, which is considered the borderline separating the outer main belt as ...
s, located in the 2 : 1
mean motion resonance
In celestial mechanics, orbital resonance occurs when orbiting bodies exert regular, periodic gravitational influence on each other, usually because their orbital periods are related by a ratio of small integers. Most commonly, this relationsh ...
with the giant planet
Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but ...
. Contrary to the nearby unstable
Griqua group A Hecuba-gap asteroid is a member of a dynamical group of resonant asteroids located in the Hecuba gap at 3.27 AU – one of the largest Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, which is considered the borderline separating the outer main belt as ...
, the orbits of the Zhongguos are stable over half a billion years.
It orbits the Sun in the