Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovers the asteroid Vesta (1807)

Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovered the asteroid Vesta on 29 March 1807 in Bremen. He had previously discovered Pallas in 1802. Olbers granted the naming honor to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who calculated the orbit in ten hours. Vesta is the second-largest asteroid by mass and volume.

Episodes

Background and detail

Background. Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers was a German astronomer born in Arbergen, now part of Bremen. He developed a method for calculating comet orbits. In 1802, he discovered the asteroid Pallas. Five years later, he found Vesta. Olbers was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1804, prior to the Vesta discovery.

Discovery. Olbers commenced his search in 1802. On 29 March 1807, he discovered Vesta in the constellation Virgo. This was a coincidence, as Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta are not fragments of a larger body. Vesta is thought to be the second-largest asteroid, both by mass and by volume, after the dwarf planet Ceres.

Naming. Olbers allowed Carl Friedrich Gauss to name the new discovery. Gauss had previously enabled astronomers to confirm the existence of Ceres. Gauss computed the orbit of the new planet in the remarkably short time of 10 hours. Olbers already had credit for discovering Pallas, so he gave the naming honor to Gauss.

People involved

Sources

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.