Provisional designation in astronomy

25,000
50,000
75,000
100,000
125,000
150,000
'90
'95
2000
'05
'10
'15
Yearly number of provisional minor planet designations assigned by the MPC since 1990. As of May 2019, a total of 1,426,477 designations have been assigned since 1869.

Provisional designation is the internationally standardized naming convention applied to astronomical objects immediately following their discovery announcement.

In the case of minor planets, more than one provisional designation may be assigned to independent discoveries of an object. Once they are recognized as denoting the same object, one of these (not necessarily the earliest) will be chosen as the primary designation for the object, based on who will get credit for the discovery. The provisional designation is augmented by a permanent designation – a catalog number – once a reliable orbit has been calculated. Provisional designations are superseded by a name in the minority of cases where one is given. As of 2019, approximately 47% of the more than 1,100,000 known minor planets remain unnumbered, as hundreds of thousands had been discovered in the previous two decades, and 4% of numbered objects have been assigned a name. This system is overseen by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union.

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