STARKVILLE – Back in January, Jean-François Goût, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Mississippi State University, was stargazing in his homemade observatory when he saw an asteroid that hadn’t been recorded before.
Goût had been through the process of logging in a potentially undiscovered asteroid before, but they had always already been discovered weeks or days earlier. This time was different.
“I spent many, many nights trying to find these things, and most of the time when I find something that is not in the database yet, after more observations come in, it turns out that it had been seen by another big telescope a couple of weeks, (or) a couple of days before,” Goût told The Dispatch. “… (It was) a couple of days later when more observations started coming in, and I started to understand … I’m going to be the first. I’m going to be the discoverer.”
Goût discovered a new asteroid in the group of asteroids known as the Jupiter Trojans, which he said share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. The discovery was also the first asteroid to be discovered from the state of Mississippi, according to a MSU press release issued Nov. 21.
“That definitely felt good,” Goût said. “(I) definitely went to tell my wife, my partner. I told her, ‘Well, it’s official I discovered an asteroid.’”
Goût was officially recognized as the discoverer of the asteroid in July after submitting his findings to the The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which is the world’s official authority for verifying new asteroids, comets and other small astrological body findings, the Minor Planet Center’s website said.
Then based on the guidelines he was given for naming an asteroid in the Jupiter Trojans, Goût settled on the name “(826856) Commodorecochran,” honoring Commodore Cochran, a 1923 MSU alumni who was the university’s first Olympian to win a gold medal at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.
When he learned about Cochran’s significance to Mississippi’s history, Goût said he knew he made the right choice.
“You can name these after athletes who participated in the Olympic Games or the Paralympic Games,” Goût said. “So there was a restriction I had to work with here for this asteroid. … I thought it would be nice to name it for a Mississippian … so I did a little bit of research, and I found that this Commodore Cochran, was the first one to win a gold medal … in the Paris Olympics. So, since I’m from France, I felt that was a nice connection.”
Professor by day, astronomer by night
While during the day Goût is focused on teaching students about computational biology, by night, he has his eyes to the sky. Goût has always been fascinated by space, so as he was searching for a new hobby to take on during the COVID-19 pandemic, he settled on stargazing.
Goût built a small wooden observatory and bought an 11-inch telescope to make observations from his backyard, he said.
He began searching more seriously for undiscovered asteroids around October 2024 before the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, came online.
“This big professional telescope, like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment, it is going to find all these asteroids, and it is going to become impossible for amateurs to make the type of discovery that I just made,” Goût said, referring to the telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory. “So I felt like I was in a rush to do it before this big telescope discovers all the asteroids that are left to discover.”
Calling the discovery a “point of pride” for the state and university, Angelle Tanner, an astronomy professor at MSU, said the discovery from an amateur like Goût is impressive in itself but especially given Mississippi’s humidity and light pollution from Starkville.
Gout’s discovery is also impressive because of the amount of patience it takes to observe the night sky and to catalogue the movement of asteroids, Tanner said.
“From (an) amateur astronomy point of view, I consider it very impressive that he does this as a hobby because it takes a lot of patience and dedication for him to do that,” Tanner said.
While new asteroids are discovered almost daily, only a few thousand of the 1.5 million known asteroids have been Jupiter Trojans, said Donna Pierce, an associate professor of astronomy at MSU.
“These days, asteroids are discovered on a near daily basis, … however, the sky is huge, and the professional astronomy community benefits from the discoveries of objects made by amateurs who help us fill in the gaps,” Pierce wrote in an email to The Dispatch. “… The fact that he did this in his backyard reflects not only his skill but the advances in telescope and computer equipment now available to the amateur astronomy community.”
While the discovery won’t make a significant impact on astronomy overall, Goût said it still was a source of self-pride for his work in the field.
“It feels like you join a club, like a small club of people who’ve done that, and it gives some bragging rights,” Goût said. “… It still feels like people will take you seriously.”
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