790 Pretoria is a

minor planet According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a minor planet is an astronomical object in direct orbit around the Sun that is exclusively classified as neither a planet nor a comet. Before 2006, the IAU officially used the term ''minor ...

orbiting the

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

that was discovered by English astronomer Harry Edwin Wood on January 16, 1912. It is a member of the

Cybele group The Cybele asteroids (also known as the "Cybeles") are a dynamical group of asteroids, named after the asteroid 65 Cybele. Considered by some as the last outpost of an extended asteroid belt, the group consists of just over 2000 members an ...

located beyond the core of the

main belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids ...

(see Minor planet groups) and named after

Pretoria Pretoria ( ; ) is the Capital of South Africa, administrative capital of South Africa, serving as the seat of the Executive (government), executive branch of government, and as the host to all foreign embassies to the country. Pretoria strad ...

, the capital city of

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

. 10 μ radiometric data collected from

Kitt Peak Kitt Peak () is a mountain in the U.S. state of Arizona, and at is the highest point in the Quinlan Mountains. It is the location of the Kitt Peak National Observatory. The radio telescope at the observatory is one of ten dishes comprising the ...

in 1975 gave a diameter estimate of 175 km. In the present day it is estimated to be in diameter. Photometric measurements of the asteroid made in 2005 at the

Palmer Divide Named after Colorado Springs founder William Jackson Palmer, the Palmer Divide is a caprock escarpment-style ridge in central Colorado that separates the Arkansas River basin from the South Platte basin. It extends from the Front Range of the ...

Observatory showed a

light curve In astronomy, a light curve is a graph (discrete mathematics), graph of the Radiance, light intensity of a celestial object or region as a function of time, typically with the magnitude (astronomy), magnitude of light received on the ''y''-axis ...

with a period of 10.370 ± 0.002 hours and a brightness variation of 0.08 ± 0.03 in magnitude. 790 Pretoria has been observed to

occult The occult () is a category of esoteric or supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of organized religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving a 'hidden' or 'secret' agency, such as magic and mysti ...

15 stars between 1998 and 2023.

References

External links

Lightcurve plot of 790 Pretoria
Palmer Divide Observatory, B. D. Warner (2009)
Asteroid Lightcurve Database (LCDB)
query form

)
Dictionary of Minor Planet Names
Google books

– Observatoire de Genève, Raoul Behrend

– Minor Planet Center * * Cybele asteroids

P-type asteroids (Tholen) 19120116 {{beltasteroid-stub