The name was made official after the certification of “adoption” was issued by the International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center.
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The International Astronomical Union confirmed that one of the darkest asteroids in the Solar System would now be known as “Freddiemercury”.
On what would have been music icon Freddie Mercury’s 70th birthday, Brian May, Queen guitarist and astrophysicist, announced that an asteroid orbiting the planets Mars and Jupiter has officially been named for the band’s beloved frontman, who died on November 24, 1991.
I’m a shooting star leaping through the sky! sang Freddie Mercury in “Don’t Stop Me Now”, and now it’s really true. However, although it may be “just a dot of light”, as he points out, it is now “a very special dot of light”. “All the remains for me to say is, ‘Happy birthday, Freddie'”.
The asteroid orbits the Sun at 20 kilometers per second and its elliptical orbit is always more than 350 million kilometers from Earth.
“You need a pretty decent telescope to see it”, explained May.
Asteroid 17473 was discovered in 1991, the same year Mercury passed away.
It is 2.2 miles (3.5km) across and has a low albedo, which means less than a third of the light that hits it is reflected.
The asteroid naming follows a weekend of commemorations of the singer in London, also hosted by Brian May, which included the unveiling of a blue plaque on Freddie’s childhood home in Feltham, West London.
“Even if you can’t see Freddiemercury leaping through the sky, you can be sure he’s there – ‘floating around in ecstasy, ‘ as he might sing, for millennia to come”, Parker said.
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May also thanked US astronomer Joel Parker of the Southwest Research Institute for his help in getting an asteroid named for the singer.
