511 Davida
main-belt asteroid
511 Davida is a large C-type asteroid in the asteroid belt. It is one of the largest asteroids; approximately tied for 7th place, to within measurement uncertainties, and the 5th or 6th most massive. It was discovered by R. S. Dugan in 1903. Davida is named after David Peck Todd, an astronomy professor at Amherst College.
Physical characteristics
Davida is approximately 270–310 km in diameter and comprises an estimated 1.5% of the total mass of the asteroid belt. It is a C-type asteroid, which means that it is dark in colouring with a carbonaceous chondrite composition.
From 2002 to 2007, astronomers at the Keck Observatory used the Keck II telescope, which is fitted with adaptive optics, to photograph Davida. The asteroid is not a dwarf planet: there are at least two promontories and at least one flat facet with 15-km deviations from a best-fit ellipsoid. The facet is presumably a 150-km global-scale crater like the ones seen on 253 Mathilde. Conrad et al.
The public source identifies “511 Davida” as main-belt asteroid. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Davida, main-belt and asteroid.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q155017. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1903, 2002 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “511 Davida” 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.