[13] It orbits the Sun in the central main-belt at a distance of 2.6–2.7 AU once every 4 years and 3 months (1,554 days).
[4][5][7] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts Petr Pravec's revised WISE-data and takes an albedo of 0.2151 with a diameter of 12.67 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 11.773.
[3][6] Several rotational lightcurve of Gehrels were obtained from photometric observations by astronomers Wiesław Wiśniewski, Petr Pravec, Pierre Antonini, Raoul Behrend, Donn Starkey, Laurent Bernasconi, Jacques Montier, Serge Heterier, Daniel Klinglesmith and Robert Stephens.
Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period between 2.83 and 2.840 hours with a brightness variation of 0.21 and 0.27 magnitude (U=2/3/3/2+/2/3).
[8][9][10][11][a][b][c] This minor planet was named in honor of Dutch-born American astronomer Tom Gehrels (1925–2011), professor at the University of Arizona, staff member of the LPL research center at Tucson, a principal investigator in the Pioneer program, receiver of the Masursky Award, initiator of the Spacewatch project, and co-discoverer of thousands of minor planets in the Palomar–Leiden survey (see above).