Charles Kowal discovered an object on 1977 October 18. The discovery was done with the 1.2 meter Schmidt telescope of the Mount Palomar observatory (California, USA). The object received the preliminary name 1977 UB. It was presumed that it concerned an asteroid, but one with an orbit far beyond the orbits of other asteroids known at that moment. That makes it a slowly moving object compared to the known asteroids at the end of the 1970s. Hence the term 'slowly moving object' (see the Chiron bibliography ). The object was also recovered on old photographic plates, one of them even dating back to 1895.
Very early, Kowal (in a conference paper toghether with Liller and Marsden) stated in 1978 that this object could possibly be a comet. It is interesting to see that Delsemme reacted during the conference that he had predicted several years earlier that thousands of comets orbit the sun at distances comparable to this object. (Kowal, Liller and Marsden (1978), see the Chiron bibliography ).
During the same conference Kowal proposes to name 1977 UB as Chiron. Chiron is a Centaur, which is a mythological figure being half man, half horse. This, of course, referring to the 'half/half' (comet/asteroid) nature of Chiron. Other Chiron-like objects belong to the so-called Centaur family.
In 1988 a coma and a tail were observed. The status of Chiron moved to that of a comet. But a comet with a diameter much bigger than that of any other known comet. And now, one should speak about (2060) Chiron = 95/P Chiron.
On 1996 February 14, for the first time since its discovery, Chiron will pass through its perihelion. A Chiron Perihelion Campaign (CPC) has been estalished. It is expected that intensive observations will learn us more about Chiron, Centaurs in general, and possibly also about the origin of comets.
For those whose native language is not English, I tried to pronounce Chiron in the "right" way. You can hear the result here (WAV-file, 2 KBytes) . Notice that there is in fact no "correct" pronunciation. The IAU also never promoted such a correct pronunciation: pronunciations do differ from language to language. I only want to avoid a problem that I encountered myself: I talked by phone, in English, about my Chiron pages. The person at the other end of the line did not know what I was talking about. So, what I have put here in the WAV audio file, should be the pronunciation that is mostly used by native English-speaking persons (if that exists, I do not know; tell me if you know). Notice that my own native language is Dutch (and "Chiron" does sound completely different in Dutch!), so that I too might be wrong. English-speaking people: please, drop me an e-mail message to confirm (or not) the "correctness" of my pronunciation. Keep in mind that I stand behind the IAU-idea to not promote a preferred pronunciation -- I only want that people understand what I am talking about... (Thanks to Dr. Brian Marsden for his prompt reaction to the first version of this paragraph today; I hope he prefers today's second version).
URL of this page is: [http://www.vub.ac.be/STER/www.astro/chibio.htm]
Last modified: 1995 October 02. This page is ©1995.