14 Irene
14 Irene is a large main-belt asteroid, discovered by the English astronomer John Russell Hind on 20 May 1851. It is orbiting the Sun at a distance of with a period of and an eccentricity of 0.168. The orbital plane is tilted at an angle of 9.1° to the plane of the ecliptic.
Observations from 2007 indicate that the rotation pole of 14 Irene lies close to the plane of the ecliptic, indicating it has an obliquity close to 90°. The fairly flat Irenian lightcurves indicate somewhat spherical proportions. This is a stony S-type asteroid with a mean diameter of around 152 km. It is spinning with a rotation period of 15 hours.
There have been seven reported stellar occultation events by Irene. The best is a three chord event observed in 2013.
History
Irene was discovered by English astronomer John R. Hind on the very early morning of 20 May 1851 from George Bishop's Observatory in London, England. At that time, he was observing near the star Lalande 29490, around the 16th hour of right ascension and 10–15°S of declination in the constellation of Scorpius. For several years prior, he had examined this region of the sky as a nearby star had been erroneously omitted from Wölfer's star charts. Near Lalande 29490, Xi Scorpii, and 50 Librae, he noticed a pale blue object of about the ninth magnitude that had not been recorded before. Since such an object was unlikely to have gone unnoticed in prior sweeps of the area, he quickly suspected its non-stellar nature. This was confirmed by follow-up observations throughout that morning, and Hind announced his discovery of a new planet through The London Times on 21 May 1851. Further announcements of the discovery were published by journals such as Astronomische Nachrichten on 2 June 1851 and The Astronomical Journal on 5 June 1851. Irene was the fourth asteroid discovered by Hind and the fourteenth discovered in history. Hind would go on to discover a further six asteroids.Naming
Irene was named after Irēnē, a personification of peace in Greek mythology. She was one of the Horae, daughter of Zeus and Themis. The name was suggested by Sir John Herschel. Hind wrote,The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in the Crystal Palace of Hyde Park, London, ran from 1 May until 18 October 1851.