8373 Stephengould (1992 AB) is an outer main-belt binary asteroid discovered on 1 January 1992 by

Carolyn S. Shoemaker Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker (June 24, 1929 – August 13, 2021) was an American astronomer and a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. She discovered 32 comets (then a record for the most by an individual) and more than 500 astero ...

and

Eugene Merle Shoemaker Eugene Merle Shoemaker (April 28, 1928 – July 18, 1997) was an American geologist. He co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with his wife Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy. This comet hit Jupiter in July 1994: the impact was televise ...

Palomar Observatory Palomar Observatory is an astronomical research observatory in San Diego County, California, United States, in the Palomar Mountain Range. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Research time at the observat ...

. The asteroid was named after the

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

paleontologist

Stephen Jay Gould Stephen Jay Gould (; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould sp ...

. The asteroid has a very high inclination, having the second highest inclination of any of the first 10,000 discovered asteroids in the asteroid belt, after 2938 Hopi. ''Stephengould'' is one of few strongly unstable asteroids located near the 2:1 mean motion resonance with the gas giant

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 ...

, that corresponds to one of the prominent

Kirkwood gaps A Kirkwood gap is a gap or dip in the distribution of the semi-major axis, semi-major axes (or equivalently of the orbital periods) of the orbits of asteroid belt, main-belt asteroids. They correspond to the locations of orbital resonances with ...

in the asteroid belt. The asteroid has a moon orbiting it, discovered in 2010 with an orbital period of 1 day, 10 hours, and 9 minutes.

See also

References

External links