A German school student, Levin Belli, has discovered an asteroid and won 1st place in Earth and Space Sciences at the regional competition of “Schüler experimentieren”.

2018AM4 is an asteroid orbiting the Sun that had gone unnoticed until it was discovered by Levin, from class 9e1 of Pascal High School in Münster, Germany. The asteroid is estimated to have a diameter of almost 2 kilometers and takes 5 years to circle the Sun once. At a distance of 450,000,000 km to the Sun, it is about three times as far from the Sun as the Earth is and is part of the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

On January 6 2018, Levin first discovered 2018AM4 on images of the 2-meter Faulkes Telescope North on Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. He was able to track the object over seven more nights until January 19th, visible as a small moving point on his images. He did this all from Münster, thanks to the Faulkes Telescope Project working with the “Astronomy and internet in Münster” (AiM) group at Pascal High School.

On January 21^st 2018, Levin’s discovery was accepted by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, USA, and given the scientific name 2018AM4. This allows every astronomer in the world to mark the current position of this asteroid in their own recordings automatically, and this greatly facilitates future observations of the object.

Finally, Levin’s success was rewarded with a first place in the regional competition of “Schüler experimentieren”. On the 4th and 5th of May, Levin presented his asteroid discovery at the state competition in the House of Technology in Essen.