An asteroid now carries the name of Àngel Jorba

The International Astronomical Union has approved the name (20137) Àngeljorba for a main-belt asteroid, in recognition of the scientific career of Àngel Jorba (1963-2025), professor of mathematics at the Universitat de Barcelona and affiliated researcher at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica. The name was published on 9 July in the bulletin of the IAU’s Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature, the body responsible for naming the minor bodies of the Solar System.

The asteroid, first designated 1996 PX8, was discovered by Eric W. Elst from the La Silla Observatory in Chile on 8 August 1996. It completes an orbit of the Sun every three years and five months, on a path eccentric enough to cross that of Mars. The WGSBN citation describes Jorba as a leading researcher in dynamical systems and celestial mechanics, notes his contributions to the understanding of how minor bodies move, and adds that, as an amateur astronomer, he promoted astronomy and mathematics among the general public.

Jorba completed his doctorate at the UB in 1991 under the supervision of Carles Simó. Much of his research addressed a question with direct consequences for spaceflight: how to keep a spacecraft in orbit around the Lagrange points, positions of equilibrium in the Sun-Earth system where there is no body to orbit in the classical sense. The trajectories that exist there cannot be computed with the methods that serve for a satellite circling a planet. Together with Gerard Gómez, Josep Masdemont and Simó, and under contract with the European Space Agency, Jorba helped develop the semi-analytical theory of these orbits and applied it to the mission analysis of SOHO, the solar observatory that has operated from the L1 point since 1996. The group’s work was collected in four volumes published by World Scientific in 2001 and remains a standard reference in mission design.

His contributions extended to scientific software. The package taylor, developed with Maorong Zou and published in 2005, generates a tailored high-order numerical integrator from a given system of differential equations, and is still cited and used in dynamical astronomy.

Jorba directed the Institut de Matemàtica de la Universitat de Barcelona and the former Departament de Matemàtica Aplicada i Anàlisi, and led the UB’s dynamical systems research group for many years. In January 2025, he received an ICREA Acadèmia award to intensify his research in celestial mechanics and astrodynamics.

Read the UB announcement