It was discovered on 24 November 1981, by American astronomer Edward Bowell at the Anderson Mesa Station near Flagstaff, Arizona, in the United States.

[1] This minor planet was named after Joseph A. Burns (born 1941), American planetary scientist and astronomer at Cornell University in New York,[1] and a co-discoverer of the trans-Neptunian object (385191) at Palomar in 1997.

In March 2010, a rotational lightcurve of Burns was obtained from photometric observations by French amateur astronomer René Roy.

Lightcurve analysis gave a well-defined rotation period of 5.315 hours with a brightness amplitude of 0.52 magnitude, indicative for a non-spherical shape (U=3).

[5][6][7][8][9] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link assumes an albedo of 0.08 and calculates a diameter of 17.86 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 12.1.