162 Laurentia is a large and dark

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 ...

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 ...

that was discovered by the French brothers

Paul Henry and Prosper Henry Paul-Pierre Henry (21 August 1848 – 4 January 1905) and his brother Prosper-Mathieu Henry (10 December 1849 – 25 July 1903) were French opticians and astronomers. They made refracting telescopes and instruments for observatories, and were ...

on 21 April 1876, and named after

Joseph Jean Pierre Laurent Joseph Jean Pierre Laurent (or Joseph Laurent) (died 1900) was a French amateur astronomer and chemist who discovered the asteroid 51 Nemausa in 1858, for which he was a recipient of the Lalande Prize awarded by the French Academy o ...

, an amateur astronomer who discovered asteroid

51 Nemausa 51 Nemausa is a large main-belt asteroid that was discovered on January 22, 1858, by Joseph Jean Pierre Laurent. Laurent made the discovery from the private observatory of Benjamin Valz in Nîmes, France. The house, at 32 rue Nationale in Nîmes ...

. An

occultation An occultation is an event that occurs when one object is hidden from the observer by another object that passes between them. The term is often used in astronomy, but can also refer to any situation in which an object in the foreground blocks f ...

by Laurentia was observed from

Clive, Alberta Clive is a village in central Alberta, Canada. It is located 15 minutes east of Lacombe and 30 minutes from Red Deer. The village was named in honour of Robert Clive, Commander-in-Chief, India. Demographics In the 2021 Census of Population co ...

on 21 November 1999. Photometric observations of this asteroid from multiple observatories during 2007 gave 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 11.8686 ± 0.0004 hours and a brightness variation of 0.40 ± 0.05 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 ...

. This is in agreement with previous studies in 1994 and 2007.

References

External links

* * 000162 Discoveries by Paul Henry and Prosper Henry Named minor planets 000162 000162 000162 18760421 {{S-beltasteroid-stub