“That was the first planet of this kind discovered in Uzbekistan”, Shuhrat Egamberdiyev, director of Mirzo Ulughbek Astronomy Institute, said in an interview. “The revelation served as a convincing testimony to the considerable progress made by our astronomers throughout independence years. At the request of scientists, President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov called the planet after one of the world’s greatest cities – Samarqand. The title was approved by the Minor Planets Center of Harvard International Astronomical Union. The center informed the global academic community of the news in a respective circular. 

In different times, international scientists had named five minor planets in honor of our eminent scientists in recognition of the latter’s marvelous merits. By acknowledging the pioneers, the scholars entitled them Uzbekistania, Avicenna, Ulughbek, Beruni and Khorezmi.

The latest discovery in Uzbekistan was made at Maydanak Astrophysics Observatory of the Astronomy Institute, located high in the mountains 120 kilometers from Samarqand. The success was the outcome of the hard work by young scientists Bahodir Hafizov and Aleksei Sergeyev. They exposed the minor planet during one of the cool nights of October 2007 while monitoring the sky with the principal observatory telescope AZT-22 with a unique mirror of one-and-a-half meters in diameter. The researchers noticed a faintly luminous object moving in the background of still stars. They determined its coordinates and calculated the preliminary elements of the orbit. The data was sent to the Minor Planet Center who informed the lucky astronomers that that object had not been listed in catalogs, and was given a preliminary number. It took them two more years of scrupulous research to specify the orbit of the unknown item to have the Minor Planet Center confirm the discovery of the Uzbek scholars.

Asteroids are blocks of protoplanetary substance. They should have become a basis for the formation of planets, but that did not happen. Science fiction authors even named it Faeton and wrote a lot of works. One of them was about the smart civilization on the planet that led to the destruction of the planet by its unreasonable actions. However, according to modern scientific idea, such planet has never been existed since it just couldn’t form.

“There are numerous fabulous works on danger of the collision of a big asteroid with Earth,” noted Shuhrat Egamberdiyev. I bring the opinion of the specialists participating in Tashkent international scientific conference to the notice of readers: there is no danger of collision of our planet with a big asteroid or comet in the soonest time.”

The conference participants informed that Maydanak observatory locating in the center of Eurasian continent, with its excellent astronomical climate to observe cosmic bodies, is planned to be included into the network of ground observatories studying the Wilson-Harington comet. Japanese scientists are going to send their exploring spacecraft there. Uzbek scientists together with their colleagues from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan continuously monitor asteroids in the Maydanak observatory.