(13963) Euphrates

Template: Infobox Asteroid / Maintenance / Error 2

( 13963 ) Euphrates is one of the outer main belt asteroid, which was discovered by the Belgian Eric Walter Elst astronomers on August 3, 1991 at the La Silla Observatory of the European Southern Observatory in Chile ( IAU code 809).

The orbit of the asteroid around the sun is in a 2:1 resonance with the orbit of Jupiter. This resonance zone is called Hecuba gap. There are there only a few asteroids. It is believed that the orbit of ( 13963 ) Euphrates for only about 100 to 500 million years stable, it is thus assigned to the Griqua asteroids, named after ( 1362 ) Griqua, the first and largest ever discovered asteroid with these properties.

( 13963 ) Euphrates was named after the Euphrates on 6 August 2003, the largest river of Asia Minor. The albedo feature on Mars called Euphrates, however, was named after the Old Testament Euphrates in 1958, as a caldera on Earth's Moon: Euphrates Patera, which was named in 2012.