Max Wolf's Discovery of Near-Earth Asteroid 887 Alinda
Abstract
Max Wolf, director of the Heidelberg Observatory (Landessternwarte Königsstuhl), was the most prodigious discoverer of asteroids in the early twentieth century. He is now best known for the discovery of the Trojan asteroids associated with Jupiter in 1906, but was a pioneer in the application of photographic techniques to astronomy, particularly for conducting asteroid surveys. His attention to detail and perseverance also led to the discovery of the near-Earth asteroid 887 Alinda, which is the eponym of an orbital class in 3:1 resonance with Jupiter. Alinda class contains several potentially hazardous asteroids, and has been particularly instructive in development of theories of eccentricity increase for resonant asteroids. Alinda was discovered on January 3, 1918, on the very edge of one of two plates taken with the 40 cm aperture Bruce double astrograph. The inability to reduce a long trail going off the plate meant that only one month later could the object again be found with the Bruce telescope, and later observed with the follow-up instrument, the 72 cm aperture Waltz reflector. In what Wolf referred to as "the greatest embarrassment of my life", reflector observations had him conclude that Alinda had a satellite. At a time when plates had to be exposed for several hours, laboriously developed and analyzed, and in the case of high eccentricity objects like Alinda, predicted with inadequate theories, Wolf's persistence allowed it never to be lost. Despite this, its essential resonant nature was not determined until 1969, despite the pioneering work by Brown (1911) on resonance in the asteroid belt and the knowledge dating to the late nineteenth century work of Kirkwood that commensurabilities were important in its structure. The majority of Wolf's plates are available as online scans through the Heidelberg Digitized Astronomical Plates project of the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory, but the Alinda discovery plate, which was broken, was scanned specially.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #227
- Pub Date:
- January 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AAS...22711403C