A Muse Given Her Own Small World

Erato's name was carried into the sky in the nineteenth century, part of a systematic astronomical practice of naming newly discovered asteroids after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. The asteroid 62 Erato, a large main-belt asteroid roughly ninety five kilometers across, was discovered in 1860 by the German astronomer Karl Theodor Robert Luther and named for the Muse of love poetry, one of several asteroids from this productive period of nineteenth century discovery given the names of individual Muses as astronomers worked their way through the standard mythological repertoire available to them. Like most objects of its type and era, 62 Erato is a large, dark, distant body about which relatively little is known beyond its orbital parameters and approximate size, its main interest to history being the naming choice itself rather than any distinctive physical feature.

The practice of naming Muses for asteroids reflects the wider nineteenth century astronomical convention of drawing systematically on classical mythology for new discoveries, a convention that by the century's end had assigned names to hundreds of minor planets and left several of the nine Muses, Erato among them, permanently attached to a specific, catalogued object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a considerably more literal kind of sky placement than the purely poetic association the Muses held in antiquity, when none of the nine was assigned a fixed home among the stars.