45 Eugenia facts for kids
| Discovery | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discovered by | H. Goldschmidt | ||||||||||||
| Discovery date | 27 June 1857 | ||||||||||||
| Designations | |||||||||||||
| 1941 BN | |||||||||||||
| Main belt | |||||||||||||
| Orbital characteristics | |||||||||||||
| Epoch November 26, 2005 (JD 2453701.5) | |||||||||||||
| Aphelion | 440.305 Gm (2.943 AU) | ||||||||||||
| Perihelion | 373.488 Gm (2.497 AU) | ||||||||||||
| 406.897 Gm (2.720 AU) | |||||||||||||
| Eccentricity | 0.082 | ||||||||||||
| 1638.462 d (4.49 a) | |||||||||||||
|
Average orbital speed
|
18.03 km/s | ||||||||||||
| 45.254° | |||||||||||||
| Inclination | 6.610° | ||||||||||||
| 147.939° | |||||||||||||
| 85.137° | |||||||||||||
| Known satellites | Petit-Prince S/2004 (45) 1 |
||||||||||||
| Physical characteristics | |||||||||||||
| Dimensions | 305×220×145 km | ||||||||||||
|
Mean radius
|
107.3 ± 2.1 km | ||||||||||||
| Mass | 5.8 ± 0.2 ×1018 kg | ||||||||||||
|
Mean density
|
1.1 ± 0.3 g/cm³ | ||||||||||||
|
Equatorial surface gravity
|
0.017 m/s² | ||||||||||||
|
Equatorial escape velocity
|
0.071 km/s | ||||||||||||
|
Sidereal rotation period
|
0.2375 d (5.699 h) | ||||||||||||
| 117 ± 10° | |||||||||||||
|
Pole ecliptic latitude
|
-30 ± 10° | ||||||||||||
|
Pole ecliptic longitude
|
124 ± 10° | ||||||||||||
| 0.040 ± 0.002 | |||||||||||||
|
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| F | |||||||||||||
| 7.46 | |||||||||||||
45 Eugenia is a big Main belt asteroid. It is famous because it is one of the first asteroids to be found to have a moon orbiting it. It is also the second known triple asteroid, after 87 Sylvia.
Discovery
Eugenia was found in 1857 by Hermann Goldschmidt. It was named after Empress Eugenia di Montijo, the wife of Napoleon III, and was the first asteroid to be named after a real person, rather than a figure from classical legend (although there had been controversy about whether 12 Victoria was really named for the mythological figure or for Queen Victoria).
Physical characteristics
Eugenia is a big asteroid, with a diameter of 214 km. It is an F-type asteroid, which means that it is very dark in colouring (darker than soot) made up of carbonate. Like Mathilde, its density appears to be unusually low, indicating that it may be a loosely-packed rubble pile (an asteroid that has been broken apart by a collision and pulled back together by gravity).
Lightcurve analysis indicates that Eugenia's pole most likely points towards ecliptic coordinates (β, λ) = (-30°, 124°) with a 10° uncertainty, which gives it an axial tilt of 117°. Eugenia's rotation is then retrograde.
Moons
Petit-Prince
In November 1998, astronomers at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, found a small moon orbiting Eugenia. This was the first time a moon orbiting an asteroid had been found by a ground-based telescope. Eugenia's moon has been named (45) Eugenia I Petit-Prince, after Empress Eugenia's son, the Prince Imperial. The moon is much smaller than Eugenia, about 13 km in diameter, and takes five days to complete an orbit around it.
S/2004 (45) 1
A second, smaller (estimated diameter of 6 km) moon that orbits closer to Eugenia than Petit-Prince has since been found and provisionally named S/2004 (45) 1. It was found by analyses of three images acquired in February 2004 from the 8.2 m VLT "Yepun" at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Cerro Paranal, in Chile. The discovery was announced in IAUC 8817, on 7 March 2007 by Franck Marchis and his IMCCE collaborators.
See also
In Spanish: (45) Eugenia para niños
