677 Aaltje is a

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 ...

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 ...

, discovered by August Kopff at Heidelberg on January 18, 1909. It was named after the Dutch singer Aaltje Noordewier-Reddingius. This object has a geometric albedo of 0.2794. Photometric observations during 2008 showed a

rotation period In astronomy, the rotation period or spin period of a celestial object (e.g., star, planet, moon, asteroid) has two definitions. The first one corresponds to the '' sidereal rotation period'' (or ''sidereal day''), i.e., the time that the objec ...

of 16.6076 ± 0.0006 hours and a brightness variation of 0.30 ± 0.02 in

magnitude Magnitude may refer to: Mathematics *Euclidean vector, a quantity defined by both its magnitude and its direction *Magnitude (mathematics), the relative size of an object *Norm (mathematics), a term for the size or length of a vector *Order of ...

. 677 Aaltje is orbiting within the 7/3

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

. This means it has a 7:3 orbital resonance with

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 Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...

, completing seven orbits for every three orbits of the planet. For smaller objects, this would typically lead to orbital instability, causing it to shift to a different orbital period. However, 677 Aaltje is too large for its orbit to have been moved by more than about 0.01 AU over the lifetime of the

Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Sola ...

. What is more likely is that orbital interactions with the

dwarf planet A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit around the Sun, massive enough to be hydrostatic equilibrium, gravitationally rounded, but insufficient to achieve clearing the neighbourhood, orbital dominance like the ...

Ceres may have shifted it to the present-day orbit—the orbit of 677 Aaltje leads it into relatively close encounters with Ceres.

References

External links

Discovery Circumstances: Numbered Minor Planets (1)-(5000)
– Minor Planet Center * * 000677 Discoveries by August Kopff Named minor planets 000677 19090118 {{Beltasteroid-stub