JILA Fellow Adjoint Peter Conti recently had a minor planet named after him.
JILA Fellow Adjoint Peter Conti now has his name among the stars -- or rather, among the celestial objects in our solar system. The International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid after Conti.
Astrophysicist Conti is known for his studies of hot luminous stars and the evolutionary connection between them. His work has studied O-type, Wolf-Rayet and Luminous Blue Variables.
As asteroids go, Minor Planet 25961 Conti is fairly average in size. The asteroid is 4.5 kilometers, about 2.79 miles, in diameter. Conti sits about 2.6 astronomical units from the sun, between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid takes a little more than 4 years to make one trip around the sun, traveling in a pretty circular orbit.