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Four asteroids were named after astronomers at the Xingming Observatory based in Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu province, by the International Astronomical Union on May 14, 2021.

Among them, the asteroid (546843) “Xuzhijian” was named after its discoverer Xu Zhijian, an amateur astronomer in Nanjing. According to sources, it takes the asteroid about 3.45 years to revolve around the Sun, with a semi-major axis of 2.285 astronomical units (AU).

Photo shows Xu Zhijian, a co-founder of the Xingming Observatory, an amateur observatory based in Urumqi, the capital city of northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Photo provided by the interviewee)

Xu has made several astronomical discoveries, including 14 supernovas, three extragalactic ones, and more than 300 SOHO comets. Born in 1989, Xu is currently a postgraduate student at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Xu developed an interest in astronomy when he was a middle school student. In 2007, he and several other astronomy enthusiasts founded the Xingming Observatory, and began looking for asteroids and supernovas using very basic equipment.

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