14871 Pyramus, provisional designation , is a dark Zhongguo
asteroid
An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...
from the outermost region of the
asteroid 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 ...
, approximately in diameter. It was discovered on 13 October 1990 by German astronomers
Lutz Schmadel
Lutz Dieter Schmadel (2 July 1942, in Berlin – 21 October 2016) was a German astronomer and a prolific discoverer of asteroids, who worked at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ARI) of the University of Heidelberg.
His special interest was th ...
and
Freimut Börngen
Freimut Börngen (; 17 October 1930 – 19 June 2021) was a German astronomer and a prolific discoverer of minor planets. A few sources give his first name wrongly as "Freimuth". The Minor Planet Center credits him as F. Borngen.
He studied gal ...
at the
Karl Schwarzschild Observatory
The Karl Schwarzschild Observatory (Officially: ''Thuringia State Observatory Tautenburg'') is a German astronomy, astronomical observatory in Tautenburg near Jena, Thuringia. It is owned and operated as under public law by the Thuringia, State of ...
in Tautenburg, Germany. The asteroid was named for
Pyramus
In Greek mythology, Pyramus and Thisbe () are a pair of ill-fated lovers from Babylon, whose story is best known from Ovid's narrative poem ''Metamorphoses''. The tragic myth has been retold by many authors.
Pyramus and Thisbe's parents, drive ...
from classical mythology.
Orbit and classification
''Pyramus'' is a non-
family
Family (from ) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictabili ...
mean motion resonance
In celestial mechanics, orbital resonance occurs when orbiting bodies exert regular, periodic gravitational influence on each other, usually because their orbital periods are related by a ratio of small integers. Most commonly, this relations ...
with the giant planet
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 ...
. Contrary to the nearby unstable Griqua group, the orbits of the Zhongguos are stable over half a billion years.
It orbits the Sun in the