Centesima (
minor planet designation: 513 Centesima) is a 50 km
Main-belt asteroid
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 ...
orbiting the
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...
.
[ It is one of the core members of the Eos family of asteroids. Relatively little is known about this tiny asteroid. It is not known to possess any ]natural satellite
A natural satellite is, in the most common usage, an astronomical body that orbits a planet, dwarf planet, or small Solar System body (or sometimes another natural satellite). Natural satellites are often colloquially referred to as ''moons'' ...
s, so its mass is unknown. However, its brief rotation period of just over 5 hours implies that the body must be exceptionally dense, for its gravity is able counteract the centrifugal force
In Newtonian mechanics, the centrifugal force is an inertial force (also called a "fictitious" or "pseudo" force) that appears to act on all objects when viewed in a rotating frame of reference. It is directed away from an axis which is parall ...
. It was discovered 24 August 1903 by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century astronomer Max Wolf.[ It was his 100th asteroid discovery, hence the name, which in Latin, means "''hundredth''".
]
References
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Eos asteroids
Centesima
Centesima
S-type asteroids (Tholen)
K-type asteroids (SMASS)
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