35 Leukothea is a large, dark
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
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 ...
. It was discovered by German astronomer
Karl Theodor Robert Luther on April 19, 1855,
and named after
Leukothea, a sea goddess in
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of ancient Greek folklore, today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology. These stories conc ...
. Its historical symbol was a
''pharos'' (ancient lighthouse); it is in the pipeline for
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
17.0 as U+1CED0 ().
Leukothea is a C-type asteroid in the
Tholen classification system,
[ suggesting a carbonaceous composition. It is orbiting the Sun with a period of and has a cross-sectional size of 103.1 km.
Photometric observations of this asteroid from the Organ Mesa Observatory in Las Cruces, New Mexico during 2010 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 rotation period of hours and a brightness variability of in magnitude. This is consistent with previous studies in 1990 and 2008.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:000035
C-type asteroids (Tholen)
C-type asteroids (SMASS)
Background asteroids
Leukothea
Leukothea
18550419