icy small body orbiting the Sun in the outer solar system. Once thought to be the most distant known asteroid, it is now believed to have the composition of a comet nucleus—i.e., a mixture of water ice, frozen gases, and dust.
Chiron was discovered in 1977 by the American astronomer Charles Kowal and classified as an asteroid with the number 2060. It is about 200 km (125 miles) in diameter and travels in an unstable, eccentric orbit between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus with a period of about 50.7 years. In 1989 two other Americans, Karen J.
Meech and Michael Belton, detected a fuzzy luminous cloud around Chiron. Such a cloud, termed a coma and being a distinguishing feature of comets, consists of dust and entraining gases expelled from the cometary nucleus when sunlight vaporizes its ices. On the basis of this discovery, Chiron was reclassified as a comet. Subsequently, additional asteroid-size icy bodies in orbits similar to that of Chiron were discovered and given the class name Centaur objects.
Armand H. Delsemme
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