46 Hestia is a large, dark main-belt

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 ...

. It is also the primary body of the Hestia clump, a group of asteroids with similar orbits. Hestia was discovered by N. R. Pogson on August 16, 1857, at the Radcliffe Observatory,

Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...

. Pogson awarded the honour of naming it to William Henry Smyth, the previous owner of the telescope used for the discovery. Smyth chose to name it after Hestia, Greek goddess of the

hearth A hearth () is the place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by a horizontal hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos (a low, partial ...

. This created a problem in Greek, where

4 Vesta Vesta (minor-planet designation: 4 Vesta) is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, with a mean diameter of . It was discovered by the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers on 29 March 1807 and is named after Vesta (mytho ...

also goes by the name ''Hestia''. The computed Lyapunov time for this asteroid is 30,000 years, indicating that it occupies a chaotic orbit that will change randomly over time because of gravitational perturbations of the planets. Hestia has been studied by

radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...

. 13-cm radar observations of this asteroid from the

Arecibo Observatory The Arecibo Observatory, also known as the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) and formerly known as the Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory, is an observatory in Barrio Esperanza, Arecibo, Puerto Rico owned by the US National Science F ...

between 1980 and 1985 were used to produce a diameter estimate of 131 km. In 1988 a search for satellites or dust orbiting this asteroid was performed using the UH88 telescope at the

Mauna Kea Observatories The Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) are a group of independent astronomical research facilities and large telescope observatories that are located at the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaii (island), Hawaiʻi, United States. The facilities are located i ...

, but the effort came up empty.

Properties

Photometric observations made in 2012 at the Organ Mesa Observatory in Las Cruces, New Mexico produced 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 21.040 ± 0.001 hours. There are two brightness minima, having luminosity variations of 0.05 and 0.12 in magnitude, respectively. In 2000, Michalak estimated Hestia to have a mass of 3.5 kg.(2000 mass estimate of 46 Hestia 0.018 / Mass of Ceres 4.75) * Mass of Ceres 9.43E+20 = 3.573E+18 Even though Hestia is only about 124 km in diameter, in 1997, Bange and Bec-Borsenberger estimated Hestia as having a mass of 2.1 kg, based on a perturbation by 19 Fortuna.(Older mass estimate of Hestia 0.109 / Mass of Ceres 4.75) * Mass of Ceres 9.43E+20 = 2.163E+19 This older 1997 estimate would give it a density of 14+ g/cm³ and make Hestia more massive than several much larger asteroids.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Hestia 000046 000046 Discoveries by N. R. Pogson Named minor planets 000046 000046 18570816