Name Lyudmila Chernykh Role Astronomer | Spouse Nikolai Chernykh | |
Discovered 2341 Aoluta, 18294 Rudenko, 6764 Kirillavrov Similar People Antonin Mrkos, Nicholas Roerich, Ilya Repin, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Suvorov | ||
Lyudmila Ivanovna Chernykh (Ukrainian: Людмила Іванівна Черних, Russian: Людми́ла Ива́новна Черны́х, born June 13, 1935 in Shuya, Ivanovo Oblast) is a Russian-born Soviet astronomer, wife and colleague of Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, and a prolific discoverer of minor planets.
In 1959 she graduated from Irkutsk State Pedagogical University. Between 1959 and 1963 she worked in the 'Time and Frequency Laboratory' of the All-Union Research Institute of Physico-Technical and Radiotechnical Measurements in Irkutsk, where she did astrometrical observations for the Time Service.
Between 1964 and 1998 she was the Scientific Worker for the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Russian Academy of Science since 1991), working in the observation base of the institute at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory (CrAO) in Nauchny settlement, on the Crimean peninsula. Since 1998 she has been the Scientific Worker for the CrAO. The Minor Planet Center credits her with the discovery of 267 numbered minor planets, which she made at CrAO, Nauchny, from the 1960s to 1980s. Several of these discoveries she made in collaboration with her husband and with Tamara Smirnova.
The asteroid 2325 Chernykh, discovered in 1979 by Czech astronomer Antonín Mrkos, was named in her and her husband's honour. Naming citation was published on 1 June 1981 (M.P.C. 6060).
List of discovered minor planets
Two of her notable discoveries are 2127 Tanya – named after Russian child diarist Tanya Savicheva, and 2212 Hephaistos, a near-Earth object of the Apollo group of asteroids.