148 Gallia

(Latin name for France) Gallia

98.09 km (derived)

(derived)

SMASS S B–V 0.858 U–B 0.423 7.4

7.63 7.67

148 Gallia is an asteroid from the central regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 90 km in diameter. It was discovered on 7 August 1875, by the French brothers Paul Henry and Prosper Henry at the Paris, but the credit for this discovery was given to Prosper. It was named after the Latin name for the country of France, Gaul. Based upon its spectrum, it is an unusual G-type asteroid (GU) and a stony S-type asteroid in the Tholen and SMASS classification, respectively.

Photometric observations of this asteroid at the European Southern Observatory in 1977–78 gave a light curve with a period of 0.86098 +/- and a brightness variation of 0.32 in magnitude. A 2007 study at the Palmer Divide Observatory in Colorado, United States, yielded a period of 20.666 ± 0.002 hours with a magnitude variation of 0.21.

This object is the namesake of the Gallia family (802), a small family of nearly 200 known stony asteroids that share similar spectral properties and orbital elements. Hence they may have arisen from the same collisional event. All members have a relatively high orbital inclination.