7 Iris
large main-belt asteroid
7 Iris is a large main-belt asteroid and possible remnant planetesimal orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. It is the fourth-brightest object in the asteroid belt. 7 Iris is classified as an S-type asteroid, meaning that it has a stony composition.
Discovery and name
Iris was discovered on 13 August 1847, by John R. Hind from London, England. It was Hind's first asteroid discovery and the seventh asteroid to be discovered overall. It was named after the rainbow goddess Iris in Greek mythology, who was a messenger to the gods, especially Hera. Her quality of attendant of Hera was particularly appropriate to the circumstances of discovery, as Iris was spotted following 3 Juno by less than an hour of right ascension (Juno is the Roman equivalent of Hera).
Iris's original symbol was a rainbow and a star: or more simply . It was encoded in Unicode 17.0 as U+1CEC1 ().
Characteristics
Geology
Iris is an S-type asteroid.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “7 Iris” as large main-belt asteroid. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q107495. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1847.
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This entry incorporates text from “7 Iris” 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.