Discovery date 24 September 1960 Minor planet category main-belt Discovered 24 September 1960 Orbits Sun | Observation arc 61.43 yr (22436 days) Inclination 4.9584° Asteroid group Asteroid belt | |
Alternative names 4011 P-L · 1964 TO21966 FR · 1974 KN1974 KP · 1974 LE Discoverers Tom Gehrels, Cornelis Johannes van Houten, Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld | ||
1923 Osiris, also designated 4011 P-L, is a main-belt asteroid discovered on September 24, 1960, by Cornelis Johannes van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld at Leiden, on photographic plates taken by Tom Gehrels at Palomar. Osiris is a C-type asteroid, about 13 kilometers in diameter.
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.
It is named after Osiris, the Egyptian god of vegetation, of the waxing and waning Moon and of the annual flooding of the Nile.