Phocaea was discovered on 6 April 1853, by French astronomer Jean Chacornac at Marseille Observatory in southern France.

[citation needed] The asteroid was named after the ancient Ionian Greek city of Phocaea, modern-day Foça in Turkey, where the founders of Marseille came from.

[19] Photometric observations of this asteroid at the Organ Mesa Observatory in Las Cruces, New Mexico during 2010 gave a lightcurve with a period of 9.9341 ± 0.0002 hours.

The brightness near the deepest minimum of the light curve showed changes with phase angle, which is the result of shadows extending across surface irregularities.

[8][9][10][12][13] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.2310 and a diameter of 75.13 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 7.83.