Another asteroid has joined the list of “Polish” objects in space, now officially named Wolszczan after Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan, who discovered the first extrasolar planets.
A Polish high school student was among the discoverers of the asteroid.
The asteroid (805997) Wolszczan, previously known as 2016 LL106 and 2012 XP157, was first spotted on June 12, 2016, in an image taken with the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. The official naming was announced in WGSBN No. 28 on December 15, 2025, published by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
Four people discovered the asteroid, from China, Japan, the United States and Poland. One of them is Polish high school student Maria Wicher, who noticed the object during the summer of 2024. Wicher, a student at the “Liceum w Chmurze” High School in Katowice, also proposed naming the asteroid after Wolszczan.
The asteroid was found as part of the Come On! Impacting Asteroids (COIAS) project, an online platform that allows users to search for small Solar System bodies in images taken by the 8-metre Subaru Telescope.
The asteroid is estimated to be 1.2 kilometres in diameter and orbits the Sun in the main asteroid belt with a period of 4.88 years, at an average distance of 2.88 astronomical units, or about 430 million kilometres.
“The discoverers have the right to name asteroids. Initially, an asteroid receives a temporary designation indicating the year of discovery and a sequential number. Once its orbit is well defined, it receives a permanent number, and a name can be proposed,” the IAU notes. “Proposed names must meet criteria established by the International Astronomical Union, which alone assigns official names recognized worldwide.”
Aleksander Wolszczan, born in 1946 in Szczecinek, is a Polish astronomer who, in 1992 together with Dale Frail, discovered the first extrasolar planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12 using the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope. His research focuses on radio astronomy, pulsar studies, and extrasolar planets.
Wolszczan earned his master’s and doctorate degrees from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 1969 and 1975, and became a professor in 1998. From 1992 until his retirement in 2024, he worked at Pennsylvania State University in the United States. He also held positions at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Toruń branch), and at Cornell and Princeton universities.
The astronomer has received numerous distinctions, including the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 1995, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1997, and has been an Honorary Citizen of the City of Szczecin since 2006. He also has a ‘katarzynka’ (Toruń gingerbread) on the Gingerbread Walk of Fame in Toruń, launched in 2003.
In science, Wolszczan has been awarded the Youth Award of the Polish Astronomical Society in 1977, the Foundation for Polish Science Prize in 1992, the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1996, the Marian Smochulowski Medal from the Polish Physical Society in 2001, and the Bohdan Paczyński Medal from the Polish Astronomical Society in 2017. (PAP)
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