Safekipedia

List of minor planets

Adapted from Wikipedia Β· Discoverer experience

A colorful illustration of the planets in our solar system, showing Mercury, Venus, Earth with its Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Each planet is shown to scale relative to the others.

The catalog of minor planets is published by the Minor Planet Center and contains many entries, including 134340 Pluto. Minor planets are small bodies in the Solar System, such as asteroids, distant objects, and dwarf planets, but not comets. As of 2022, most of these are asteroids from the asteroid belt.

The first object in this catalog is 1 Ceres, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. Pluto, listed as 134340 Pluto, is the best-known entry. Many of these minor planets have names, mostly of people, places, and figures from mythology and fiction.

There are many discoverers of minor planets, observing from various registered observatories. Teams like Spacewatch, LINEAR, MLS, NEAT, and CSS have found many of them. In the future, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to discover even more minor planets, increasing the numbers greatly. There may be trillions of these small bodies in our Solar System, especially in the Kuiper belt.

Description of partial lists

The list of minor planets has more than 700 partial lists. Each list contains 1000 minor planets grouped into 10 tables. The information comes from the Minor Planet Center and other sources.

Each minor planet has a permanent and provisional designation, a discovery date and location, and a category. The size of the minor planet, called its mean diameter, is also listed when known. Discoveries are credited to astronomers, surveys, or observatories.

The example shows five minor planets all discovered at Palomar Observatory. They were found by astronomers Cornelis van Houten, Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld, and Tom Gehrels. Only one, 189004 Capys, has a name. Its color shows it is a Jupiter trojan, about 10 kilometers wide. The others are smaller asteroids from the asteroid belt.

Main articles: Minor-planet designation and Provisional designation in astronomy Β§ Minor planets

DesignationDiscoveryProperties
PermanentProvisionalNamed afterDateSiteDiscoverer(s)CategoryDiam.
1890014889 P-Lβ€”September 24, 1960PalomarC. J. van Houten, I. van Houten-Groeneveld, T. GehrelsΒ Β·3.4 km
1890026760 P-Lβ€”September 24, 1960PalomarC. J. van Houten, I. van Houten-Groeneveld, T. GehrelsΒ Β·1.5 km
1890033009 T-3β€”October 16, 1977PalomarC. J. van Houten, I. van Houten-Groeneveld, T. GehrelsΒ Β·4.4 km
189004 Capys3184 T-3CapysOctober 16, 1977PalomarC. J. van Houten, I. van Houten-Groeneveld, T. GehrelsL510 km
1890055176 T-3β€”October 16, 1977PalomarC. J. van Houten, I. van Houten-Groeneveld, T. GehrelsΒ Β·2.9 km

Main index

This section gives an overview of all the lists of numbered minor planets. Each table represents 100,000 minor planets, and each cell shows a list of 1,000 minor planets in order. The information comes from the Minor Planet Center. For more details, see Β§Β top.

Specific lists

For an overview, see Minor planet, Category:Lists of minor planets, and Category:Lists of asteroids.

The following are lists of minor planets grouped by their features, paths around the Sun, or how they were found:

Images

The Crab Nebula: A colorful cloud of gas and dust formed from an ancient star explosion, captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
A screenshot showing information about minor planets in our solar system, including the well-known entry #134340.
A stunning view of our planet Earth as seen from the Apollo 17 spacecraft, showing Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula from space.
A stunning view of Earth rising over the lunar horizon, captured by astronauts during the Apollo 8 mission.
An artist's illustration of HE 1523-0901, one of the oldest known stars in our galaxy, located about 7500 light years from Earth.

Related articles

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on List of minor planets, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Images from Wikimedia Commons. Tap any image to view credits and license.