305 Gordonia is a fairly typical, although sizeable

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 ...

.Dynamics of comets and asteroids and their role in earth history. Shin Yabushita, J. Henrard. p.243 It was discovered by

Auguste Charlois Auguste Honoré Charlois (; November 26, 1864 – March 26, 1910) was a French astronomer who discovered 99 asteroids while working at the Nice Observatory in southeastern France. Asteroid discovery His first discovery was the asteroid 267 Tirz ...

on 16 February 1891 in

Nice Nice ( ; ) is a city in and the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative city limits, with a population of nearly one million James Gordon Bennett Jr James Gordon Bennett Jr. (May 10, 1841May 14, 1918) was an American publisher. He was the publisher of the '' New York Herald'', founded by his father, James Gordon Bennett Sr. (1795–1872), who emigrated from Scotland. He was generally known ...

., his patron. The

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 ...

of 305 Gordonia shows a periodicity of , during which time the brightness of the object varies by in magnitude.

References

External links

* * 000305 Discoveries by Auguste Charlois Named minor planets 000305 18910216 {{Beltasteroid-stub