26 Proserpina
main-belt asteroid
26 Proserpina is a main-belt asteroid discovered by German astronomer R. Luther on 5 May 1853. It is named after the Roman goddess Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres and the Queen of the Roman Underworld. Another main-belt asteroid, 399 Persephone, discovered in 1895, is named after her Greek counterpart. Its historical symbol was a star inside a pomegranate; it is encoded in Unicode as U+1CECD ASTRONOMICAL SYMBOL FOR ASTEROID PROSERPINA ().
This object is orbiting the Sun with a period of 4.33 years. It has a cross-section size of around 90 km and a stony (S-type) composition. Photometric observations of this asteroid have produced discrepant estimates of the rotation period. A period of 12.13 hours was reported in 1979, followed by 10.6 hours in 1981 and 6.67 hours in 2001. Observations made in 2007 at the Oakley Observatory in Terre Haute, Indiana produced a light curve with a period of 13.06 ± 0.03 hours and a brightness variation of 0.21 ± 0.01 in magnitude. This was refined by a 2008 study, giving a period of 13.110 ± 0.001 hours.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “26 Proserpina” as main-belt asteroid. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as main-belt asteroid. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
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 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q149658. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1853, 1895, 1979 and 1981.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “26 Proserpina” 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.