48 Doris
Main-belt asteroid
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.
To find a name for the object, Jacques Babinet of the Academy of Sciences created a shortlist and asked the geologist Élie de Beaumont to make the selection. De Beaumont chose Doris, after an Oceanid in Greek mythology. Since Doris was discovered on the same night as 49 Pales, de Beaumont suggested naming the two "The Twins".
01Physical characteristics
An occultation on 19 March 1981 suggested a diameter of 219±25 km. Observations of an occultation on 14 October 1999, using four well-placed chords, indicate an ellipsoid of 278×142 km and that 48 Doris is an extremely irregularly shaped object.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “48 Doris”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- 48 Doris VLT (2021), deconvolved.pdf by VSO Very Large Telescope SPHERE/ZIMPOL team, CC BY-SA 4.0
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