List of minor planet discoverers
Wikimedia list article
This is a list of notable minor-planet discoverers credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of one or several minor planets (such as near-Earth and main-belt asteroids, Jupiter trojans and distant objects). As of 22 October 2025, the discovery of over 800,000 numbered minor planets are credited to 2,186 astronomers, observatories, telescopes or surveys.
Discovering astronomers
The table consist of the following fields:
Astronomers: links to the corresponding article about the discovering astronomer on Wikipedia.
Discoveries: displays the total number of discovered and co-discovered minor planets made by the discoverer (numbered bodies only). It links to the corresponding "Discovery by..." category, which are subcategories of Category:Discoveries by astronomer. These categories do not contain discoveries for which no page on Wikipedia exists. Astronomers with only a few discoveries sometimes do not have their own discovery-category (redlinks). For those who have discovered only one single minor planet, the link in the discovery column directly points to the corresponding entry in the list of minor planets.
DOB–DOD: displays the astronomer's date of birth and, if applicable, death.
Name(s) at MPC: displays the name of the discoverer as used by the MPC, where the abbreviated first name is written before the family name.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of minor planet discoverers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.