83 Beatrix
Main-belt asteroid
83 Beatrix is a fairly large asteroid orbiting in the inner part of the main asteroid belt. It was discovered by Annibale de Gasparis on 26 April 1865. It was his last asteroid discovery. A diameter of at least 68 kilometres (42 mi) was determined from the Beatrician stellar occultation observed on 15 June 1983. It is named for Beatrice Portinari, beloved of Dante Alighieri and immortalized by him in La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy.
On 16 February 2001, an occultation of a magnitude +9.09 star by this asteroid was observed from three locations. The resulting chords matched an elliptical profile with a mean radius of 35.9 km. The observers noted some dimming and flickering at the beginning of the event, which may indicate the star was binary or the asteroid has an irregular shape. Previous occultations had been observed in 1983 and 1990, which produced a much larger size estimate of 81.4 km.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “83 Beatrix”, 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:
- 83 Beatrix.png by https://damit.cuni.cz/projects/damit/, CC BY 4.0
- Орбита астероида 83.png by Jet Propulsion Laboratory. California Institute of Technology, Public domain
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