The asteroid was discovered on 11 October 1925, by Soviet–Russian astronomer Sergey Belyavsky at the Simeiz Observatory on the Crimean peninsula.
[4] In October 2003, a rotational lightcurve of Ljuba was obtained from photometric observations by American amateur astronomer Walter Cooney at this Blackberry Observatory (929) in Port Allen, Louisiana.
Lightcurve analysis gave a well-defined rotation period of 33.8 hours with a brightness variation of 0.17 magnitude (U=3).
[12] Lower-rated lightcurves by Richard Binzel, René Roy and Laurent Bernasconi gave a somewhat longer period of 36, 41.5 and 42 hours, respectively (U=1/2/1).
[6][7][8][9][10][11] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0668 and a diameter of 55.10 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 9.85.