It was discovered on 24 February 1938, by Finnish astronomer Yrjö Väisälä at the Turku Observatory in southwest Finland.

[1] This minor planet was named after Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander (1799–1875), author of the famous Bonner Durchmusterung and 19th-century head of the ancient observatory at Turku and Bonn (520).

[12] In August 2017, a rotational lightcurve of Argelander was obtained from photometric observations at the Chilean Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory using the SARA South Telescope.

Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period of 4.063±0.006 hours and a brightness variation of 0.48 magnitude (U=2+).

It gave a concurring period of 4.058350±0.000001 hours, as well as two spin axes at (3.0°, −81.0°) and (183.0°, −72.0°) in ecliptic coordinates (λ, β).