35 Leukothea

Leukothea (minor planet designation: 35 Leukothea) is a large, dark asteroid from the asteroid belt. It was discovered by German astronomer Karl Theodor Robert Luther on April 19, 1855, and named after Leukothea, a sea goddess in Greek mythology. Its historical symbol was a pharos (ancient lighthouse); it is in the pipeline for Unicode 17.0 as U+1CED0 𜻐.

Leukothea is a C-type asteroid in the Tholen classification system, suggesting a carbonaceous composition. It is orbiting the Sun with a period of 1887.983 day and has a cross-sectional size of 103.1 km.

Photometric observations of this asteroid from the Organ Mesa Observatory in Las Cruces, New Mexico during 2010 gave a light curve with a rotation period of $31.9$ hours and a brightness variability of $0.42$ in magnitude. This is consistent with previous studies in 1990 and 2008.

The computed Lyapunov time for this asteroid is 20,000 years, indicating that it occupies a chaotic orbit that will change randomly over time because of gravitational perturbations of the planets.