Discovery
It was discovered on April 20, 1904, by Max Wolf in Heidelberg, and initially catalogued as 1904 NY. The origin of its name is not known; it may be named after the mythical Hercules, or after an unknown woman of that name. The bulk of the asteroids discovered by Wolf around this date were named for characters in operas, but if this name was also drawn from such a source, no explanation has been recorded.
Read more about this topic: 532 Herculina
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know,—we have been more successful in our own days:Mthousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves, from the first moment they received it, and with such distinct intelligence of its progress and workings, as to require no evidence of its truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)