Researcher names asteroid after his astronomy professor

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — To make a teacher feel truly special, dump the apples and rename a star or asteroid.

That's what research specialist Jeffrey Larsen did in honor of his former astronomy professor, Roberta Humphreys, at the University of Minnesota.

Asteroid 10172 is now Asteroid Humphreys. While working on the Spacewatch Project at the University of Arizona, Larsen renamed the heavenly body because Humphreys "taught me things you don't pick up from a textbook, which is about 80 percent of what a research astronomer has to do."

Asteroid Humphreys is 3 to 8 miles in diameter and orbits the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It was discovered in 1995.