[1] The assumed carbonaceous C-type asteroid has a very long rotation period of 88 hours and measures approximately 37 kilometers (23 miles) in diameter.

This minor planet was named after Sidney Van den Bergh (born 1929), Dutch-born Canadian astronomer and former director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory.

In August 2012, a rotational lightcurve of van den Bergh was obtained from photometric observations in the R-band by astronomers at the Palomar Transient Factory in California.

Lightcurve analysis gave a long rotation period of 87.918 hours with a brightness amplitude of 1.09 magnitude, indicative of an elongated, non-spherical shape (U=2).

[6][7][8] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results obtained by IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0259 and a diameter of 37.75 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 11.7.