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According to discoverer P. Wild, this minor planet's name has two meanings. One is a reference to the concept of melancholia, a temperament of morosity and wistfulness and associated with the melancholic humour in the theory of humourism. Melancholia was associated with the classical element of earth, and with the planet Saturn. The other meaning is the feeling specific to astronomers when the sky is cloudy for weeks on end. The symbol for this minor planet is the pentagonal face of a truncated rhombohedron, as depicted in Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving Melencolia I, with a horizontal line crossing near the lower point as in the alchemical symbol for earth, and with a Saturnian cross above, representing both a saturnine temperament and depressing seeing conditions. This asteroid's semantic counterpart is 8061 Gaudium. |
5708 Melancholia
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