234 Barbara is a main belt asteroid that was discovered by German-American astronomer Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters on August 12, 1883, in Clinton, New York.
The object is orbiting the Sun with a semimajor axis of 2.385 AU, a period of 3.68 years, and an eccentricity of 0.25.
[3][4] Observations of light curves and stellar occultations suggest the surface exhibits large concave areas.
[5] Polarimetric study of this asteroid reveals anomalous properties that suggests the regolith consists of a mixture of low and high albedo material.
[6] It is the prototype for a class of asteroids called "Barbarians" that display a strong infrared absorption band at 2μm, which is a characteristic of an FeO–enriched spinel mineral.