Petr Pravec
Encyclopedia
Petr Pravec is a Czech
Czech people
Czechs, or Czech people are a western Slavic people of Central Europe, living predominantly in the Czech Republic. Small populations of Czechs also live in Slovakia, Austria, the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, Canada, Germany, Russia and other countries...

 astronomer
Astronomer
An astronomer is a scientist who studies celestial bodies such as planets, stars and galaxies.Historically, astronomy was more concerned with the classification and description of phenomena in the sky, while astrophysics attempted to explain these phenomena and the differences between them using...

, born in Třinec
Trinec
Třinec is a town in Frýdek-Místek District, Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It lies on the Olza River, in the historical region of Cieszyn Silesia. The town has 37,405 inhabitants as of 2009, in 2001 17.7% of the population were Poles...

, a prolific discoverer of binary asteroid
Asteroid
Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...

s using lightcurve
Light curve
In astronomy, a light curve is a graph of light intensity of a celestial object or region, as a function of time. The light is usually in a particular frequency interval or band...

 photometric studies. He is leading the effort of a large consortium of stations called BinAst to look for multiplicity in the NEA
Near-Earth object
A near-Earth object is a Solar System object whose orbit brings it into close proximity with the Earth. All NEOs have a perihelion distance less than 1.3 AU. They include a few thousand near-Earth asteroids , near-Earth comets, a number of solar-orbiting spacecraft, and meteoroids large enough to...

 and inner main-belt populations. He has found 289 asteroids—112 alone, and 177 with other astronomers.

Asteroid 4790 Petrpravec
4790 Petrpravec
4790 Petrpravec is a main-belt asteroid discovered on August 9, 1988 by E. F. Helin at Palomar.- External links :*...

is named after him.
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