Asteroid (805997) Wolszczan, previously listed under provisional designations including 2016 LL106, received its official name in a bulletin published on December 15 by the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature (WGSBN), the body that approves names for asteroids and other small solar system objects.
The asteroid was first recorded in an image taken on June 12, 2016, using Japan’s Subaru Telescope, an 8.2-meter optical-infrared telescope operating on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
While the image dates back to 2016, the object was later identified through analysis carried out by a four-person team of discoverers from China, Japan, the United States and Poland.
Among them is Maria Wicher, a Polish student who found the asteroid during the summer of 2024. Wicher studies at Liceum w Chmurze, an online high school based in Katowice, southern Poland. She also initiated the proposal to name the asteroid after Wolszczan.
The discovery was made through Come On! Impacting Asteroids (COIAS), an online platform that allows members of the public to search for small bodies in the solar system by inspecting telescope images from Subaru.
Projects such as COIAS are part of a broader "citizen science" trend, where non-professionals contribute meaningfully to scientific research under structured, expert-designed programs.
Astronomers estimate the asteroid is about 1.2 kilometers across. It orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, completing one revolution roughly every 4.88 years. Its average distance from the Sun is about 2.88 astronomical units, or roughly 430 million kilometers.
Under long-standing convention, the right to propose a name for an asteroid belongs to its discoverers. An object first receives a temporary designation that reflects the year of discovery and a sequential code. Once its orbit is sufficiently well determined, it is assigned a permanent catalog number, after which a formal name can be submitted for approval.
The International Astronomical Union, founded in 1919 and based in Paris, is the globally recognized authority for standardizing official names of celestial objects.
The new name honors Aleksander Wolszczan, a Polish radio astronomer born in 1946 in Szczecinek, northwestern Poland.
Wolszczan is best known internationally for co-discovering the first confirmed planets outside the solar system in 1992, together with astronomer Dale Frail.
The planets were detected around the pulsar PSR B1257+12 using observations from the Arecibo Observatory’s radio telescope, a finding that helped open the modern era of exoplanet research.
Wolszczan earned his master’s degree and doctorate at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, north-central Poland, in 1969 and 1975, and later worked at several institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
From 1992 until his retirement in 2024, he was affiliated with Pennsylvania State University in the United States, and he also held positions at Cornell and Princeton.
Aleeksander Wolszczan during a lecture in Warsaw in 2008. Photo: PAP/Rafał Nowakowski
In Poland, Wolszczan has been recognized with state honors including the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit and the Commander’s Cross of the Polonia Restituta Order. He has also received major scientific prizes in Poland and abroad for his contributions to astronomy.
The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was home to what had been the world's largest radio telescope for over 50 years, since its opening in 1963. It collapsed in 2020 after support cable failures.
The dish was immortalised on screen as the setting for the climactic sequence in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye.
(rt/gs)
Source: naukawpolsce.pl