Pales (
minor planet designation: 49 Pales) is a large, 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 German-French astronomer
Hermann Goldschmidt
Hermann Mayer Salomon Goldschmidt (June 17, 1802 – August 30 or September 10 1866) was a German-French astronomer and painter who spent much of his life in France. He started out as a painter, but after attending a lecture by the famous Fren ...
on 19 September 1857 from his balcony in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
.
The asteroid is named after
Pales
In ancient Roman religion, Pales was a deity of shepherds, flocks and livestock. Regarded as male by some sources and female by others, ''Pales'' can be either singular or plural in Latin, and refers at least once to a pair of deities.
Pales' fes ...
, the goddess of
shepherds in
Roman mythology
Roman mythology is the body of myths of ancient Rome as represented in the literature and visual arts of the Romans. One of a wide variety of genres of Roman folklore, ''Roman mythology'' may also refer to the modern study of these representa ...
. Since it was discovered on the same night as
48 Doris
Doris ( minor planet designation: 48 Doris) is one of the largest main belt asteroids. It was discovered on 19 September 1857 by Hermann Goldschmidt from his balcony in Paris.
Name
To find a name for the object, Jacques Babinet of the Academy o ...
, geologist
Élie de Beaumont suggested naming the two "The Twins".
[
The orbit of this asteroid has close to a 2:1 commensurability with the orbit of ]Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the 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 slightly less than one-thousandth t ...
.[ On 17 January 2000, this minor planet was observed ]occulting
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 ...
a 9th magnitude star from seven locations. These timed chords across the silhouette allowed an estimate to be made of the object's dimensions,[ yielding a cross-section of .][
Pales has been studied by ]radar
Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, we ...
.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:000049
Background asteroids
Pales
In ancient Roman religion, Pales was a deity of shepherds, flocks and livestock. Regarded as male by some sources and female by others, ''Pales'' can be either singular or plural in Latin, and refers at least once to a pair of deities.
Pales' fes ...
Pales
In ancient Roman religion, Pales was a deity of shepherds, flocks and livestock. Regarded as male by some sources and female by others, ''Pales'' can be either singular or plural in Latin, and refers at least once to a pair of deities.
Pales' fes ...
CG-type asteroids (Tholen)
Ch-type asteroids (SMASS)
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