It was discovered on 2 March 1976, by astronomer Claes-Ingvar Lagerkvist at the Kvistaberg Station of the Uppsala Observatory in Sweden.
[1] Oja has been characterized as a common, stony S-type asteroid by Pan-STARRS' photometric survey, in line with the overall spectral type of the Flora family.
The consolidated lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period of 7.222 hours and a brightness variation between 0.31 and 0.39 magnitude (U=3/3).
[5][6][7][8] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts an albedo of 0.1573 from Pravec's revised WISE data and uses a diameter of 8.38 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 13.01.
[3] This minor planet was named after the Swedish astronomer of Estonian descent Tarmo Oja (born 1934), who was a professor in astronomy at Uppsala University and the director of the discovering Kvistaberg Station during 1970–1999.