Bianca ( minor planet designation: 218 Bianca) is a sizeable

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 is 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 was discovered by Johann Palisa on 4 September 1880, 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 ...

and was named after the Austro-Hungarian opera singer Bianca Bianchi (real name Bertha Schwarz). The Vienna newspapers contained several published accounts of the circumstances surrounding the honor extended to the diva in Spring 1882. In the late 1990s, a network of astronomers worldwide gathered lightcurve data that was ultimately used to derive the spin states and shape models of ten new asteroids, including (218) Bianca. The shape model for this asteroid is asymmetrical.Durech, J.; Kaasalainen, M.; Marciniak, A.; Allen, W. H. et al. "Asteroid brightness and geometry", ''Astronomy and Astrophysics'', Volume 465, Issue 1, April I 2007, pp. 331-337.

References

External links

Asteroid Lightcurve Data File
* * Background asteroids

Bianca Bianca is a feminine given name. It means "white" and is an Italian cognate of Blanche. Variants * Blanche: French * Bianca: Italian * Bianka ( Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, German, English, French, Icelandic, Finnish, Dutch, Norwegian, C ...

S-type asteroids (Tholen) 18800904 {{S-beltasteroid-stub