Discovery date 24 September 1960 Minor planet category main-belt Discovered 24 September 1960 Asteroid group Asteroid belt | MPC designation 1846 Bengt Observation arc 58.21 yr (21261 days) Orbits Sun | |
Alternative names 6553 P-L · 1951 CW11957 YP People also search for Sun, 9511 Klingsor, 11767 Milne | ||
1846 Bengt, provisional designation 6553 P–L, is an asteroid from the main-belt discovered on September 24, 1960, by Cornelis van Houten, Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld and Tom Gehrels, who took the photographic plates at Palomar Observatory. The asteroid measures about 11 kilometers in diameter and orbits the Sun at a distance of 2.0–2.7 AU once every 3.6 years.
It was named after renowned Danish astronomer Bengt Strömgren (1908–1987), on the occasion of his 70th birthday. He was an authority in the field of stellar structure and stellar evolution, director of the Yerkes Observatory from 1951 to 1957, and president of the International Astronomical Union (1970–1973).
The designation P–L stands for Palomar–Leiden, named after Palomar Observatory and Leiden Observatory, which collaborated on the fruitful Palomar–Leiden survey in the 1960s. Gehrels used Palomar's Samuel Oschin telescope (also known as the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope), and shipped the photographic plates to Cornelis Johannes van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld at Leiden Observatory. The trio are credited with several thousand asteroid discoveries.