| 5201 Ferraz-Mello | Discovered 1983 Dec. 1 by E. Bowell at the Anderson Mesa Station of the Lowell Observatory. |
| Named in honor of Sylvio Ferraz-Mello (b. 1936), dynamicist at the University of São Paulo, well known for a number of contributions to solar-system dynamics. These include a perturbation model valid for very high eccentricities, the discovery of chaotic eccentricity jumps to values larger than 0.9 in the 3:1 resonance with Jupiter, and the explanation of the lack of large long-lived objects in the 2:1 resonance, in contrast to the existence of many objects in the 3:2 resonance (Hildas). In other areas, he has worked on a Fourier transform able to deal with unevenly spaced observations, Hamiltonian perturbation theories for nonlinear resonances, and the study of variable dMe stars. Ferraz-Mello served as president of IAU Commission 7 (Celestial Mechanics) from 1994 to 1997. |
| NOTE: some special characters may not display properly (any characters within {} are an attempt to place the proper accent above a character) |
| Reference: 19990728/MPCPages.arc | Last Updated: 2010-06-11 |
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