It was discovered on 4 January 1989, by Japanese astronomers Seiji Ueda and Hiroshi Kaneda at the Kushiro Observatory on Hokkaido, Japan.
[5] Conversely, an alternative application of the hierarchical clustering method found it to be a core member of the Astraea family (according to Milani and Knežević).
[14] The asteroid is one of several early "kilo-numbered" minor planets that were dedicated to renowned scientists or institutions including:[15] 4000 Hipparchus is follow by the asteroids 5000 IAU (for the International Astronomical Union), 6000 United Nations (for the United Nations), 7000 Curie (for the pioneers on radioactivity, Marie and Pierre Curie), and 8000 Isaac Newton (for Isaac Newton),[15] while 9000 Hal (after HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey) and 10000 Myriostos (after the Greek word for ten-thousandth, and to honor all astronomers) were named based on their direct numeric accordance.
In February 2014, a rotational lightcurve of Hipparchus was obtained from photometric observations by astronomers at the Phillips Academy (I12) and HUT (H16) observatories.
[12] A previous observation at the Palomar Transient Factory from August 2012, only gave a fragmentary lightcurve with a longer period of 7.935 hours (U=1).