It was discovered on 21 September 1901, by Italian astronomer Luigi Carnera at Heidelberg Observatory in southern Germany.
[3] Tergeste orbits the Sun in the outer main-belt at a distance of 2.8–3.3 AU once every 5 years and 3 months (1,915 days).
[14] Tergeste is a stony S-type asteroid, which belongs to the small group of 41 bodies classified as rare L-subtype in the SMASS taxonomy.
[5][6][7][8][9] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link agrees with the revised WISE results and takes an albedo of 0.1914, an absolute magnitude of 7.96 and a diameter of 77.1 kilometers.
[4][6] In July 2005, a rotational lightcurve of Tergeste was obtained by several photometrists including Laurent Bernasconi, Reiner Stoss, Petra Korlević and Raoul Behrend.