An asteroid called Furia appears in the sky

An asteroid called “Furia” shines in the sky. This had to be a surprise made by the members of the Astronomical Society Schiapparelli for the 86^th birthday of its founder, professor Salvatore Furia, who unfortunately left us on August 2010.

The asteroid was discovered on 19^th January 2002 at the Astronomical Observatory G. V. Schiapparelli of Campo dei Fiori. The discoverer Luca Buzzi has been committed in the research of asteroids and comets for years, and his team is among the most active in the world for these kind of observations, which are coordinated by the Minor Planet Centre of the International Astronomical Union.

After the necessary and long checks, it has been included in the final catalogue of asteroids with the number 194982.

At that point, the Astronomical Society Schiapparelli named it “Furia”, with the following reason, accepted by the International Astronomical Union: “Salvatore Furia, naturalist and amateur astronomy, founded in 1956 in Varese the Astronomical Society G. V. Schiapparelli, together with the Astronomical Observatory and the City of Sciences: a unique place in Italy, opened to volunteers and visitors, with the aim of building an ideal bridge of comprehension between science and people.”

The asteroid has a diameter of about 3 km. At present, it is travelling in the Libra Constellation, about 584 million km far from Earth, and it is not visible to telescopes because of its apparent proximity to the Sun, around which it orbits in 3.85 years.

The orbit of asteroid Furia places itself in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. In that region Father Piazzi discovered Ceres in 1801, the biggest known asteroid and at the first place in the catalogue. Today the known asteroids amount to over 500,000: they are the debris of an unborn planet, because of the gravitational influence of the planet Jupiter.

The image above is the result of different pictures taken by Luca Buzzi with the 60 cm telescope and the digital CCD camera of the Astronomical Observatory of Campo dei Fiori.

The asteroid “Furia” is the bright dot indicated by the arrow. The stars look blurred because the image has been made by “following” the asteroid, a little more than 300 million km from both the Earth and the Sun in Leo Constellation.

Now we can state even more that Professor Furia will watch his “City of Sciences” from the sky, and that, as he loved to say, his “perihelion transits” will never stop.