44 Nysa

44 Nysa sits in the inner main asteroid belt, where it stands out as the biggest, brightest, and first confirmed member of the rare E-type class—asteroids known for their shiny, enstatite-rich surfaces. Discovered on 27 May 1857 by Hermann Goldschmidt in Paris, the asteroid was named for the nymph and daughter of Aristaeus who raised the god Dionysus in Greek myth. High-resolution images from 2026 revealed a highly concave, irregular body with three distinct lobes, carved by deep valleys and craters. Astronomers think this shape came from the slow merger of three separate asteroids, making Nysa a contact trinary. It spins once every 6.42 hours and has a uniform surface color. A small, unnamed moon was also spotted in 2026. Nysa’s origins are unclear. It likely never suffered a destructive collision, since no family of asteroids shares its orbit and composition. Still, a few small near-Earth asteroids—including 2015 TC25 and 1998 KY26—may be fragments that broke off from it. Nysa orbits in the same region as the Nysa–Polana complex, a jumble of overlapping asteroid families, but researchers generally don’t link it to that group because their compositions differ.

**Discovery and naming** Goldschmidt, a German–French astronomer working in Paris, spotted Nysa on the night of 27 May 1857 using a 4-inch (10 cm) telescope usually set up on the upper floor of his apartment or studio. He saw a star-like object in Libra, shining at magnitude 10.1. Poor weather followed, but he reobserved it on 1 June. He telegraphed his find to the *Astronomische Nachrichten* and announced it the next day as the 44th planet—his sixth asteroid discovery. Over the following weeks, Goldschmidt and others gathered more observations to calculate its orbit and ephemerides. Meanwhile, he kept finding new asteroids, starting with 45 Eugenia on 27 June. Earlier that June, he had asked polymath Alexander von Humboldt to suggest a name. Humboldt chose Nysa, after the nymph and daughter of Aristaeus who raised Dionysus (also called Bacchus). In a letter to Goldschmidt, Humboldt expressed his honor at naming it and praised the discovery on behalf of astronomers Johann Franz Encke, Karl Christian Bruhns, Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, and Franz Brünnow. Encke relayed the chosen name in a separate letter.