Demeter is a non-family asteroid of the main belt's background population when applying the hierarchical clustering method to its proper orbital elements.
[1][4] In June 2016, a rotational lightcurve of Demeter was obtained from photometric observations by American astronomers Tom Polakis and Brian Skiff at the Command Module Observatory (V02) in Tempe, Arizona.
[16] The results supersede previous observations by Robert Stephens, Olivier Thizy, René Roy and Stéphane Charbonnel from July 2001, which gave a period of 9.70 and 9.701 hours with an amplitude of 0.12 and 0.14 magnitude, respectively.
[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0464 and a diameter of 25.61 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 11.91.
This conflict did not occur in Greek-influenced Slavic languages such as Russian, which had adopted Cerera for 1 Ceres, and were thus free to use the modern Greek form Demetra for the asteroid Demeter.